The
Paging Game
Jeff
Berryman, University of British Columbia
1. Each player gets several million "things."
2. Things are kept in "crates" that hold 512 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 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 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.
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 ever accidentally zark somebody else's
thing even if it has
the same thing number as one of 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-used things stay mostly in
a warehouse. This is efficient stock control.
5.
Sometimes even 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 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 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.
LONG
LIVE THE THING KING
[The following appear to have been added later, as they were typed
in a different font.]
Notes:
1.
The VM Thing King is considerably stronger than the Thing King
of the system described above. He uses crates containing 4096
things.
2.
Recently the Thing King has tired of carrying crates back and
forth between the warehouse and the workshop one at a time and
has purchased a forklift. When it is someone else's turn to zark
their things, the Thing King stacks the grubbiest of your crates
on his forklift and hauls them to the warehouse. The warehouse
is too small for the forklift to do much maneuvering, so once
a stack of crates has been taken to the warehouse it can't be
unstacked without bringing it into workshop. This means if you
want to zark a thing which is stacked in the warehouse the whole
stack of crates must be brought into the workshop. While this
might appear to generate a lot of unnecessary crate traffic, it
is more than offset by the reduction in the number of trips necessary.
Thanks
to www.netfunny.com
