The Guilded Gambit

Registration decided every team's guild

Before a team was given anything else they huddled around one phone and filled in a form together. The form was worth nineteen points, spread across what a team said it liked, how it preferred to play and which games it would pick up at a loose end. The guild that collected the most of those points was usually the one that claimed them, though the final sort also had to keep the guilds close to even in size.

Which guild would have claimed you?

This is the form. Fill it in and it will sort you the way it sorted them.

The last step

A final step of the form asked teams to reflect about the people with whom they play:

• Who keeps their nerve when there is something to lose?
• Who will walk up to strangers and start a conversation?
• Who is your maker, good with their hands and quick with a puzzle?
• Who thinks a step ahead of everyone else?
• Who is your performer, quick with improvisation or strong on imaginative tasks?

The form finished by naming three guilds most interested in them, which helped the sorting process later.

The Hall of Champions

Fifteen banners hung around the walls of the hall. Five games ran on tables in the middle of the floor, and five guild leaders moved between them watching who was worth recruiting.

The five games on the floor

One for each guild, chosen to feel like the guild running it and playable in a few minutes by strangers. Open any of them for the rules sheet that sat on the table.

The fifteen banners

Fourteen of the names on these walls were real Ludic Legends. One was an interloper, and naming him to a guild leader got a team recruited. Click any banner to read it full size.

How to solve the banners

Every team was handed a printed list of the fifteen names. Almost every banner spoke up for somebody else on that list, so the work was to clear the names that were covered and see who was left over.

One. Annette Zamboni supplies the method

Her banner is not a sentence, it is a grid of words. Read down the four columns and it gives four instructions at once: every fourth word unlocks clues, scan for context and listen, I am a past champ, start with the word begin. Read across the rows instead, and every fourth word spells the last of those back, which confirms the method.

Two. Scan, and listen

Annette Zamboni's second instruction was the one that mattered: scan for context and listen. Four banners carried a QR code, and three of them were labelled Local Designer and led to the work of Gene Koo, Connie Vogelmann and Elizabeth Hargrave, who design real games a person can go and buy. The fourth sat on Trusty Oddsmith's banner with no label on it at all, and it played a recording rather than opening a website. That recording held the only instruction that appeared nowhere in print: cross off any name beginning with X. Xander Jenstone and Xavier Gerry came off the list.

Three. Compare notes with another team

Xander Jenstone's banner, before it comes off the list, tells teams to compare notes with one another and says his favorite champions loved to switch places. There were two versions of the printed list. Put a sheet next to another team's and two names have moved: Jamie Mysteries and Elizabeth Hargrave. It is the only clue on the walls that cannot be solved alone.

Four. Let the rest vouch for each other

• Jamie Mysteries says two fellow champions can be found with weapons from Clue. William Tallz is holding a candlestick. Plurgle Brimston is holding a wrench.
• John Colorman prints in two colors. The red words read I am a real champion. The gold words read go to posters with metal objects, which is the same candlestick and the same wrench.
• William Tallz points at a nine-letter surname meaning stumpers, which is Mysteries.
• Plurgle Brimston says the Class of 2025 took in exactly two new members, which accounts for Connie Vogelmann and Spinda Wheel.
• Georgia Flame explains that her nickname and Gene Koo's combine into MATCHMAKER, and that one more pair does the same: Ilene S. Usual's BUSINESS and Trusty Oddsmith's MODEL. All four of them, she says, are former champions.
• Xavier Gerry names Annette Zamboni as his best friend.

Five. Count what is left

Twelve of the fifteen are spoken for by somebody else on the wall. Two are struck off by the recording. That leaves one.

One name on the sheet had nobody speaking for it: Gary Elbridge, Risktaker, Class of 1925, who loves pushing boundaries of what anyone thinks is fair or reasonable to try, and who has never won anything.

That was the answer the guild leaders were waiting for. Turned around, with one vowel changed, Gary Elbridge is Elbridge Gerry, a real person whose name was misspelled on purpose so that a guild leader could say it out loud and still deny it.

Remember the name. It comes back twice.

The sorting machine

A team that named the interloper correctly visited the guildmaster, who was stationed at a vending machine near the exit and shared a four-digit PIN. The team keyed it into an iPad and the machine dropped an envelope into the tray to reveal their guild. That PIN did double duty: it also served as the team's passcode for the app.

Twenty-four teams, five guilds

This is where everybody landed. The machine sorted teams one at a time and balanced as it went, counting teams rather than players, since an even spread of teams is what keeps the games at a zone fair; player numbers mattered less.

Everyone who played

The envelope

Inside was a letter from the guild captain, a printed battle map, ten clues in verse, a laminated compass and five small paper objects.

The five objects

Click any of them to expand the design.

Their first job was a toll

The verses gave that away one zone at a time. Five of the ten zones had a host, and each host wanted to see one of these before handing a code over. The GO square bought a team into the Taskmaster's game. The die finished the Croupier's throw in the sidewalk. The Architect wanted the letter tile, the Arbiter wanted the bridge card, and the Steward wanted the page.

Their second job was an address

Each object carried its own number, though none of them said so. The GO square is where a board begins. The die showed two pips, the letter tile was worth three, the bidding card was the four of hearts, and the story was Chapter Five. Put them in that order and the first four stop being objects and start being sounds.

Go to Elbridge. The cemetery.

The fifth object named the cemetery. It was a page from a gravedigger's story about the gentlemen from Congress and the wall of the ground they lie in, and there is only one Congressional Cemetery. It sat east of every zone on the battle map, and it was the one place that mattered which the map did not show.

Any team that had been paying attention in the Hall of Champions already had the name. So the five scraps did two jobs at once, a toll at five different hosts and an address between them, and a team could spend the whole afternoon handing them over without noticing the second one. What nobody had yet was a reason to go there, or anything to do once they arrived. That came out of the clue sheet.

The app

Every zone, every score and every change of hands on the map went through a single page on a phone. Teams logged in with the name and PIN the guildmaster had given them, and from that point the app knew which guild they belonged to, which zones they had reached and what each of those zones owed them.

Below is a walk through what a team could open during the day, using a made-up Tacticians team called The Quiet Rooks.

The ten zones

Each zone was somewhere teams had to travel to and explore. The shape was the same every time: a verse put them in roughly the right streets, the place itself gave up a three-digit code, the code opened the game, and the game decided who held the ground. Five zones had a host who wanted to see one of the paper objects before handing the code over. At the other five there was nobody to ask, and teams worked it out between themselves.

A zone belonged to whichever guild led its game at that moment, and the map redrew itself as the lead changed.

Open any zone for the clue, the solution and how it finished.

The Hidden Hand

The five objects gave teams a place. The ten clue verses gave them the reason. One word in each verse was printed in bold, and an eleventh sat in the footer of the sheet. Because the sheet did not list the zones in numerical order, the bold words only resolved when they were read in the order it printed them.

At his plaque, scan and take the digits seen before retrospective.

Elbridge Gerry is buried at Congressional Cemetery, east of every zone on the map. He signed the Declaration of Independence, and he is the only signer buried in Washington.

The code at the plaque opened the cemetery’s own retrospective on him, headed America at 250 Retrospective: Elbridge Gerry, Founding Father. The digits before that word are 250, and 250 typed into the app unlocked that team’s gerrymander.

Each guild had a different move, and this is the wording a team read on its own phone.

Five teams got there, in this order: Falling Behind, The Spirit Seven, The Breadwinners, Lud-ites … but we're game, and ATF5000. That order matters later. At the ceremony the moves played out backwards, last sealed first, which left the team that found the grave earliest with the final word on the map.

The day, hour by hour

The app recorded the whole board once an hour. What follows is that record, on the same map the players had in their pockets. Press play to watch the day run, or pick an hour. Zone 4 changed hands four times.

The ceremony

At three o'clock the games closed and the afternoon's scoring stopped. Coming to the ceremony was optional and not everybody came. Two things on the map were still unsettled when they sat down.

Extra time on the eleventh node

The Hidden Hand stayed open for a few minutes after play ended, so that teams who had cracked the bold-word instruction but could not get out to Congressional Cemetery and back in time could still claim their move. Only one team had sealed one during play. The other four did it in that window.

The last vote

Zone 9 was the haiku zone, the only one on the map that speed and luck could not win. Teams who found the plaque outside CHAW spent part of the afternoon writing three lines on their phones about what games and play meant to them, and none of it was scored at the time. Each guild then voted for its own best poem, which produced five finalists and no winner.

So Zone 9 was still unclaimed when the room sat down. The five finalists were read aloud without naming the guilds that wrote them, and everybody voted.

Five gerrymanders

Then we opened the five sealed moves and played them one at a time. Each one landed on the board the last one had left behind. Every one of them is a gerrymander: it changes who owns ground without anybody playing for it. What started as the Risktakers ending the day in the lead finished with the Builders taking the Guilded Gambit.

After all the map changes the Builders gained two zones, which was enough to tip the final result toward them. Their own move echoed a Risktakers re-roll of Zone 9, and the re-roll came up Builders. The second zone came from the Storytellers, whose Plot Twist flipped Zone 7 and moved the Builders from the bottom of it to the top. The Storytellers ended the day with nothing.

The Breadwinners’ Deal appeared to do nothing at all. Zone 2 and Zone 3 were both led by the Risktakers, so swapping them changed no colors on the map, but it swapped the order underneath and that put the Diplomats second on Zone 3. One move later the Spirit Seven knocked the Risktakers off Zone 3 and the Diplomats took it. The Spirit Seven are Tacticians, and before the Deal second place had been theirs.

Who covered the most ground

Finding a zone meant solving its verse, getting to the right place and entering the code. Across the day teams did that 191 times, an average of 8.3 of the 10 zones each. Counting the Hidden Hand as an eleventh, these are the teams that reached ten or more.

Three teams went eleven for eleven. Six more reached ten.

Some of the most effective performers

The list above counts ground covered. This one is about what happened once a team got there: how high they placed in the games they played, and whether they found the eleventh node.

Every zone above has its own board of top performers.

What players said

We asked six questions after the day. The survey closed on November 6 with ten responses, and every one of them is published in full.

Read the responses

The people who made it possible

What the app cost to build

The web app that ran the day was built with AI assistance over three months. We measured what that used in electricity, water and carbon, what we did in response, and how anyone can run the same numbers on their own project.

Read the AI footprint report