Last modified: Thu 12/27/96 2015 PST
As with all Waldzell games, players must agree on the ontology that will underlie their game. For more information, see the description of this step for zeroth-order games.
The starting point of play in a third-order game is a completed second-order game, the skeleton, which is used as described below. This skeleton may be obtained by selecting a completed game from the Game Archive or by playing a second-order game in anticipation of third-order play. In either case, the primary criterion is that the skeleton must be compatible with the ontology to which the players have committed for their third-order game. In fact, it needn't have been played as a second-order game, as long as a template-analogue pair can be found in the Archive.
Players agree on the order in which they will move, and play in that order throughout the game.
Starting from the chosen skeleton, players take turns making one assertion per move. An assertion may relate a template term with an analogue term in the underlying skeleton, but it needn't do so. Apart from the initial disjointness of the two parts of the skeleton, no further break in connectivity is allowed in third-order play. Any assertion can add a new term to the network (or to one of them, if the template and analogue are still unconnected), but it needn't do so.
The third-order game is complete (for purposes of submission to the Game Archive) when every skeleton term (in both the template and the analogue) is connected to a term in the other part of the skeleton either directly or through terms introduced during third-order play. Obviously, all skeleton terms are indirectly connected in some fashion as soon as a single assertion connects the two sub-networks.