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The Paging Game Game Rules
The Paging Game
(Jeff Berryman, University of British Columbia)
Rules
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. You can only zark your things, not anybody else's.
8. Things can only be zarked when they are in the workshop.
9. Only the *Thing King* knows whether a thing is in the workshop
or in a warehouse.
10. The longer a thing goes without being zarked, the *grubbier* it
is said to become.
11. The only 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.
12. 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 workshop, 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.
13. 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 accidentally zark somebody else's thing
even if it has the same thing number as yours.
Notes
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 13 is that everybody's thing numbers will
be similar from game to game, regardless 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 anybody 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 shop 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 back of 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
Thing King won't have to get things from the dump so often. This
should speed up the game when ther are a lot of players and the
warehouses are getting full.
Long Live The Thing King
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