THE PAGING GAME Jeff Berryman, University of British Columbia *** RULES *** 1) Each player gets several million *things*. 2) Things are kept in *crates* that hold 4096 things each. Things in the same crate are called *crate-mates*. 3) Crates are stored either in the *workshop* or in the *warehouse*. The workshop is almost always too small to hold all the crates. 4) There is only one workshop, but there may be several warehouses. Everybody shares them. 5) Each thing has its own *thing number*. 6) What you do with a thing is to *zark* it. Everybody takes turns zarking. 7) You can only zark your own things, not anybody else's. 8) Things may only be zarked when they are in the workshop. 9) Only the *Thing King* knows whether a thing is in the workshop or in a warehouse. 10) The longer a thing goes without being zarked, the *grubbier* it is said to become. 11) The way to get things is to ask the Thing King. He only gives out things in crates. This is to keep royal overhead down. 12) The way to zark a thing is to give its thing number. If you give the number of a thing that happens to be in the workshop, it gets zarked right away. If it is in a warehouse, the Thing King moves the crate containing your thing into the workshop. If there is no room in the workshop, he first finds the grubbiest crate in the workshop, whether it be yours or somebody else's, and packs it off with all its crate-mates to a warehouse. In its place he puts the crate containing your thing. Your thing gets zarked and you never even know that it wasn't in the workshop all along. 13) Each player's stock of things has the same numbers as everybody else's. The Thing King always knows who owns what thing and whose turn it is, so you can't ever accidentally zark somebody else's thing even if it has the same number as one of yours. *** NOTES *** 1) Traditionally, the Thing King sits at a large, segmented table and is attended by pages (the so-called "table pages") whose jobs it is to help the king remember where all the things are and to whom they belong. 2) One consequence of Rule 13 is that everybody's thing numbers will be similar from game to game, regardless of the number of players. 3) The Thing King has a few things of his own, some of which move back and forth between workshop and warehouse just like anybody else's, but some of which are just too heavy to move out of the workshop. 4) With the given set of rules, oft-zarked things tend to get kept mostly in the workshop, while little-zarked things stay mostly in a warehouse. 5) Sometimes even the warehouses get full. The Thing King then has to start piling things on the dump out back. This makes the game slow because it takes a long time to get things off the dump when they are needed in the workshop. A forthcoming change in the rules will allow the Thing King to select the grubbiest things in the warehouses and send them to dump in his spare time, thus keeping the warehouses from getting too full. This means that the most infrequently-zarked things will end up in the dump so the Thing King won't have to get things from the dump so often. This should speed up the game when there are a lot of players and the warehouses are getting full. LONG LIVE THE THING KING!