I remember that game from spending some time in Africa too!

We were there with a couple of smart people, so we started winning against the local kids/ In reaction, they rapidly started “telling us about” rules and exceptions that they forgot to mention earlier. Definitely not making those up. The new rules were not outrageously out of place, but they had a real tendency to turn our previous move into a clearly damaging one.

We started calling those frequent, sudden shifts “African rules.” Kids were not a fan of that expression. Apparently, we were there to make the kids feel great about themselves and help the local authority. We had this belief that winning only occasionally would make their victory sweeter, and learning how to lie to white folks while keeping a straight face seemed to be a key life skill for them.

Goal shifts made the game a lot more interesting, though: could we play in a way that made their rule change predictable so that we could win the meta-game?

I'm not sure how you would be able to program that, presumably with a finite grammar of rules, but it could update the original challenge a bit.