Inventory

Resources without the little wooden cubes

Any game where people hold things eventually runs into the same two problems: the things go missing, and nobody can remember who gave what to whom. A tray on a screen fixes both without taking the game itself away. The items are yours to name, up to eight of them, so this is a wood and stone and coin tracker for one table and a stickers and stars and tickets tracker for another.

The transfer is the part worth having. Moving three wood from one tray to another is a single action that cannot go wrong: it never moves more than the giver holds, it says how many really moved, and it writes a line in the log so a disagreement five minutes later has an answer. The bank at the bottom is where things come from and go back to, which keeps the total in the game fixed whenever you want it to be.

Classroom economies

A class economy is one of the better uses for this. Name the items after whatever your room actually trades, hand them out for the things you want more of, and let them be spent on the things everybody wants. The line under the trays showing how many of each item exist in the whole game is the part teachers find useful: an economy with no ceiling stops meaning anything by about the third week.

It also works for a group project with limited supplies, a maths lesson about trading, or a long game of anything where somebody has to be the banker. Being the banker is the job nobody enjoys, and it is the one job here that the screen can genuinely take over.

Keeping it fair, and what it will not do

Nothing here is hidden. Every tray is visible to everybody looking at the screen, which is the right call for a resource game and the wrong one for a game of secrets. Anything a player must see alone belongs on a page that hides it: the secret role cards and the hidden information cards both pass the device round with a screen in between.

For points rather than things, the score tokens are the page, and for a limited number of uses of an ability rather than a quantity of an item, the power-ups track that instead. Names come from the same shared list every tool here with players uses, and they never leave this browser.

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.inv.items and pph.inv.state, 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.