Score tokens

Why a stack beats a number

A six year old who cannot yet compare 34 and 41 at a glance can tell you instantly which of two stacks is taller. That is the entire argument for physical counters in a family game, and it survives the move to a screen: the tray shows the shape of somebody's score before anybody has read the number beside it. The number is there too, because a score has to be exact when the game ends, but it is not what the room is looking at while the game is going on.

Denominations add the second thing counters do: they make a score something you handle rather than something you announce. Giving somebody a twenty-five is an event. Watching your own pile of ones turn into one bigger token when it is tidied is satisfying in a way that watching a number tick over is not. These are counters for keeping score, nothing more: nothing is wagered here, nothing of value is won, and no money is involved anywhere on this site.

The change problem, and why one is always a token

Counters run into the same problem as real coins. Somebody holding a single twenty-five owes ten, and there is nothing in their tray that is ten. At a table you break the token at the bank; here the tool does it for you, rebuilding the tray as the fewest tokens that add up to what is left and saying out loud that change was made, so nobody thinks a token has vanished.

That only works if the smallest token is a one, which is why every set here starts with one. With ones available, any amount can be built and any debt can be paid, so the tool is never stuck with a score it cannot represent. It is a small constraint that removes an entire category of stuck states, and it is the reason the values are chosen from ready-made sets rather than typed in.

When to use the plain board instead

Tokens are slower than numbers, and that is a real cost. A quiz with five teams and forty questions wants the scoreboard: type a number, move on. Use the trays when the scoring is occasional and worth making a moment of, or when the people playing are young enough that a visible quantity is worth more than an accurate one.

For a score that is a position rather than a quantity, the progress track is the page, and for a resource that goes up and down all game rather than accumulating, the energy meter does that. 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.tokens.state, pph.tokens.denoms and pph.tokens.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.