Set collection

The half-built set is the interesting one

Set collection is one of the few game mechanics that works on absolutely everybody, and the reason is the near miss. Two out of three is a far more compelling position than nought out of three or three out of three, because it turns one specific piece into the thing you want. Everything interesting that follows, the trading, the blocking, the hoarding, comes out of that one feeling.

Which is why a board has to show the gap rather than just the total. Each player's sets are drawn as their members, held ones filled in and missing ones outlined, so the shape of somebody's collection is readable from across a table without anybody reading a number. The set lights up when it closes, and says so in words as well, because a completion is a moment and deserves to be one.

Vocabulary sets in a classroom

The classroom version is the best use of this page. Make each set a family of words: the days of the week, the parts of a plant, six verbs in a tense, the capitals of five countries. A child earns a member by using it correctly, and the board fills in front of the room. It is the same machine as a sticker chart with one important difference: the pieces belong to a group, so finishing means something rather than just accumulating.

The scoring is worth thinking about here. A large bonus and no per-member points rewards finishing something, which suits a class that gives up halfway. Points per member with no bonus rewards steady effort, which suits a class where a few children would never finish a set at all. You can change it between lessons without touching the sets themselves.

What it does and does not enforce

The board records who holds what; it does not police whether they should. Two players can hold the same member at once, because plenty of games have several of each piece and the ones that do not are policed by the table anyway. Nothing is hidden either: every board is visible to the room, which is right for a collection game and wrong for a game of secrets.

For quantities of a thing rather than membership of a set, the inventory tray counts and transfers instead. For a plain running total the scoreboard is faster, and for points drawn as objects the score tokens are the page. Names come from the same shared list every tool here with players uses.

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.sets.defs and pph.sets.state, 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.