Pull-tab ticket

Hints that arrive one at a time

A quiz question with three hints printed underneath is a quiz question with no hints, because everybody reads all three at once. Hiding them under tabs puts the pace back in your hands: the team gets the first hint, works at it, and asks for the second only when they are stuck.

That is the whole tool. Write the hints in the order you want them found, leave it in order mode, and hand the phone over. The tabs will not let anybody skip to the answer, which means nobody has to be trusted not to.

Treasure hunts and escape rooms

A hunt lives or dies on its pacing. Ten clues on one sheet is a race to read; ten clues under tabs is ten small moments. Put a clue under each tab, set it to in order, and every team moves at the speed of their own searching rather than at the speed of the fastest reader.

For an escape room the same thing is a hint system. Write the nudges from gentle to obvious, and the room can take one when it needs one without a host having to decide how much to give away.

The symbol ticket, and what it is not

Switch the tabs to symbols and the ticket becomes the other kind of pull-tab: peel them all, and three alike is a match. It is a good way to hand out a prize with a bit of suspense, and a good way to give one team in a hunt a lucky ticket that the others can see them win.

Nothing is wagered here and nothing of value is won. If you want a draw rather than a reveal, the bag of tokens and the envelopes both do it in one move.

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.tabs.items, pph.tabs.mode, pph.tabs.count, pph.tabs.match and pph.tabs.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.