Prediction slips

Locking is the whole game

Ask a room to guess a number out loud and you will not learn what anybody thought. The second guess anchors to the first, the fourth splits the difference, and the person who goes last has heard everything and risks nothing. Written slips, locked before anybody speaks, are the oldest fix for that and the reason a sealed envelope is a thing at all.

So there is no way to edit a slip once it is locked and no way to peek at one before they all open. The device takes it, hides it and asks for the next person, and every slip appears at the same moment afterwards. It costs you the ability to fix a typo and it buys you an answer that is worth looking at.

Sports nights, tie-breaks and hypotheses

Three rooms use this and they want the same thing for different reasons. A sports night wants score predictions before kick-off and a tally that survives the evening. A quiz wants the tie-break question everybody dreads, how many jellybeans, how far is the moon, answered honestly and scored by who came closest rather than by who shouted first.

A science lesson wants the hypothesis written down before the experiment runs, which is the part that is usually skipped and the part that makes the result mean anything. Set the answer type to a number, take the predictions, run the experiment, type in what happened. If a round needs a clock beside it, the countdown timer is the page for that, and the scoreboard is where a longer evening's points belong.

Points, and nothing else

There is nothing to wager here and nothing to win. The page has no odds, no stake, no pot and no way to enter one, because it is a scoring mechanic for a game rather than anything else. Points go up, somebody is ahead, and at the end of the evening the tally is cleared with a button. That is the whole of it, and it is worth saying plainly because predicting outcomes for points looks superficially like something it is not.

What the page keeps is the tally against the names in your roster and the points each kind of answer is worth. The slips themselves are gone when the next question starts, the question is never stored, and a share link carries the points settings and nothing else at all.

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.predict.tally and pph.predict.scoring, 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.