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[FUN] or [INFO/TECHNICAL], depending on your view... Rules of the Game:
- Each player
owns several million "things".
- Each thing
has its own "thing number".
- Things are
kept in "crates" that hold 4096 things
each. Things in the same crate are called
"crate-mates".
- Crates are
stored either in a warehouse or in the workshop.
The workshop is almost always too small to hold
all of the crates.
- There is only
one workshop, but there may be several
warehouses. Everybody shares them.
- What you do
with a thing is to "zark" it. Everybody
takes turns zarking things.
- You can only
zark your own things, not anybody else's.
- The way you
get things is to ask the "Thing King".
He only gives out things in multiples of four.
This is to keep the royal overhead down.
- Things can be
zarked only when they are in the workshop.
- Only the
Thing King knows whether a thing is in the
workshop or in a warehouse.
- The longer a
thing goes without being zarked, the
"grubbier" it is said to become.
- The way you
zark a thing is to give its thing number to the
Thing King.
- If you give
the number of a thing that is in the workshop, it
gets zarked right away.
- If you give
the number of a thing that is in a warehouse, the
Thing King must bring the crate containing your
thing into the workshop before the thing can be
zarked.
- If there is
no room in the workshop, the Thing King 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.
- 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 one of
yours.
Notes:
- 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.
- One
consequence of Rule 16 is that everybody's thing
numbers will be similar from game to game,
regardless of the number of players.
- 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.
- With the
given set of rules, oft-zarked things tend to get
kept mostly in the workshop, while seldom-zarked
things stay mostly in a warehouse. This is
efficient stock control.
- Sometimes
even the warehouses get full. The Thing King then
has to start piling things on the dump out back.
This can make the game slower because it takes a
long time to get things off the dump if they are
needed in the workshop. A forthcoming change in
the rules will allow the Thing King to select the
grubbiest crates in the warehouses and send them
to the dump in his spare time, thus keeping the
warehouses from getting too full. This means that
the most infrequently zarked things will end up
on the dump, and the 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.
Long Live the Thing King!
Jeff Berryman, c. 1972
University of British Columbia
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