Challenge cards

A deck, not a random button

Most challenge generators pick at random every time, which means the eighth card can be the first card and an evening has no shape. This one behaves like the pack of cards it is drawn to look like. There are a fixed number of challenges in it, a card you finish goes into the done pile, a card you skip goes to the bottom, and the deck runs out. Running out is the point: it is what turns a pile of prompts into a game with an ending.

Because it is a deck, it can be put down and picked up. The order, the done pile and the card you were looking at are all kept in this browser, so a game interrupted by dinner is still the same game afterwards, with the same cards left in it.

Parties, classrooms and the five minutes before a lesson ends

Four ready-made sets, and they are genuinely different jobs. The party set is quick wits and quick hands. The classroom set is the one to put on the board when a lesson finishes early: naming, counting, spelling and explaining, all answerable by anybody in the room. The moving set is PE warm-ups and brain breaks. The set for younger children is animal noises, silly walks and colours.

Add names and a finished card can be pointed at whoever did it, which turns the deck into a light competition without needing a scoreboard. If you want a real one, the scoreboard is next door, the countdown timer is what to put beside a challenge that needs a clock, and the penalty wheel is the same idea for forfeits rather than tasks.

Writing challenges that are safe to hand round

The rule behind every card in the four family sets is that a nine year old could be handed it in front of a class and nothing would go wrong. Nothing asks anybody to climb, to hold their breath, to eat anything, or to do something to another person. The physical ones are the ones a PE teacher would recognise, and every one of them can be done standing beside a chair in ordinary clothes.

Use the same rule for your own. A good challenge is one sentence, takes under a minute, and can be judged by everybody watching without an argument. The ones that fail are usually the ones that need equipment nobody has, or that only one person in the room could possibly do.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.challenge.custom, pph.challenge.deck, pph.challenge.tally and pph.challenge.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.