Lives

The bit of the game nobody wants to do

Elimination games run on a number everybody has to remember, and somebody always remembers it differently. Three lives each sounds simple until the fourth round, when one player is certain they had two left and the rest of the table is certain they had one.

Hearts on a screen in the middle of the table end that. Every change is a button press anybody can see, the count is in the open, and out is written next to the name rather than argued about. It works for musical statues, quiz knockouts, card games with three lives, and any playground game that runs until one person is left.

A light touch in a classroom

The same board works for a class team game where a table loses a heart for calling out, as long as the hearts come back. The plus button is there precisely so a lost life is not permanent, and a shared pool means the whole class is on the same side rather than watching one table lose.

Put it on the board in full screen and pair it with the countdown timer for the round and the scoreboard for points that do not run out. The bag of tokens picks who answers next without anybody calling a name.

Big enough to read across a room

Full screen makes the hearts and names as large as the device allows, which is the point: a tracker nobody can read from the back is a tracker one person ends up narrating. The colour is never the only signal either, because every row also says the count in words and marks a player as out.

A life lost, a life gained and going out make three different sounds, and every one of them is written on the board at the same moment, so the game works with the sound off and works for somebody who cannot see the screen.

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.

It works on the one device in front of you, passed around or propped where everybody can see it. There are no rooms, no codes and no accounts, because there is no server behind this site for any of that to run through.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.lives.state, pph.lives.start, pph.lives.mode and pph.lives.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.