Round marker

Keeping a structured game on its rails

Any game with a fixed shape to its rounds eventually produces the same question: did we do the upkeep? A round of three or four phases is easy to follow for the first ten minutes and easy to lose by the fortieth, particularly if somebody goes to answer the door halfway through. The cost is rarely the rule itself, it is the argument about whether the rule already happened.

A marker in the middle of the table solves it by being the only thing anybody has to agree on. One tap moves the game on one step, the phase name is the biggest thing on the screen, and the strip underneath shows the last dozen steps, so a table that has genuinely lost its place can find it again in a second rather than rebuilding the round from memory.

Station rotations in a classroom

The classroom version is a carousel: four groups, four stations, and a signal every eight minutes. Name the stations as the phases, set the total to the number of rotations, and the front of the room shows which station everybody is on and how many are left. A group that arrives late can look up rather than ask, which is worth more than it sounds when the room is loud.

It works the same way for a lesson with a fixed shape: starter, input, practice, review. Naming the phases out loud at the start and leaving them on screen means a class knows what is coming, and the marker reaching the end is a cleaner finish than a teacher announcing one.

The one tracker with nobody in it

Almost everything else in this family needs names before it does anything. This one does not: it tracks the game rather than the people, so it is useful the moment it loads. That makes it the right thing to leave on a second screen or a spare phone propped at the front, running alongside whichever tool the players are actually touching.

The obvious companions: the leader token for whose round it is, the countdown timer when a phase should have a length as well as a name, and the scoreboard for what the rounds are actually worth. None of them talk to each other, which is deliberate: they are separate pages you open side by side, not one tool pretending to run your whole evening.

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.round.state, pph.round.phases and pph.round.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.