The Paging Game
Jeff Berryman,
1. Each player gets several million things.
2. Things are kept in crates that hold 4096 things each. Things in the same crate are called crate-mates.
3. Crates are stored either in
the workshop or a warehouse. The workshop is almost always too small to
hold all the crates.
4. There is only one workshop
but there may be several warehouses.
Everybody shares them.
5. Each thing has its own thing number.
6. What you do with a thing is
to zark
it. Everybody takes turns zarking.
7. Things can only be zarked when they are in the workshop.
8. Only the Thing King knows whether a thing is in
the workshop or in a warehouse.
9. The longer a thing goes
without being zarked, the grubbier it is said to become.
10. The way you get things is to
ask the Thing King. He only gives out
things in multiples of eight. This is to
keep the royal overhead down.
11. The way you zark a thing is to give its thing number. If you give the number of a thing that
happens to be in the workshop it gets zarked right
away. If it is in a warehouse, the Thing
King packs the crate containing your thing back into the workshop. If there is no room in the workshop, he first
finds the grubbiest crate in the workshop, whether it be yours or somebody
else’s, and packs it off with all its crate-mates to a warehouse. In its place he puts the crate containing
your thing. Your thing then gets zarked and you never knew that it wasn’t in the workshop
all along.
12. Each player’s stock of
things have the same numbers as everybody else’s. The Thing King always knows who owns what
thing and whose turn it is, so you can’t ever accidentally zark
somebody else’s thing even if it has the same number as one of yours.
1. Traditionally, the Thing
King sits at a large, segmented table and is attended to by pages (the
so-called “table pages”) whose job it is to help the King remember where all
the things are and who they belong to.
2. One consequence of Rule 12
is that everybody’s thing numbers will be similar from game to game, reguardless of the number of players.
3. The Thing King has a few
things of his own, some of which move back and forth between workshop and
warehouse just like everybody else’s, but some of which are just too heavy to
move out of the workshop.
4. With the given set of rules,
oft-zarked things tend to get kept mostly in the
workshop while little-zarked things stay mostly in a
warehouse. This is efficient stock
control.
5. Sometimes even the
warehouses get full. The Thing King then
has to start piling things on the dump out back. This makes the game slower because it takes a
long time to get things off the dump when they are needed in the workshop. A forthcoming change in the rules will allow
the Thing King to select the grubbiest things in the warehouse and send them to
the dump in his spare time, thus keeping the warehouse from getting too
full. This means that the most
infrequently-zarked things will end up in the dump so
the Thing King won’t have to get things from the dump so often. This should speed up the game when there are
a lot of players and the warehouses are getting full.