Wassail

Six trees — capacities three, three, four, four, five, five — and baskets that always hold exactly enough to fill every one. Hang an apple a turn in any tree with room. The instant a tree is FULL it is picked: strictly the most apples takes it, worth its capacity; a tie pays nobody. Most points when the baskets are empty. Complete the trees you are winning before the mob arrives; starve the trees you are losing one apple short for as long as the baskets hold.

How it feels

• A clock made of apples
• Majorities with teeth
• The last room is the whole game

What the design is for

• 01

  The score comes at the fill

  Not at the end — the moment the last apple lands. Complete trees you lead before the pickers behind can mob them; leave the ones you trail one apple short for as long as the baskets hold. Every apple is a vote and a timer at once.

• 02

  The orchard always fills exactly

  The baskets sum to the orchard’s whole room — twelve each at two, eight at three, six at four. Every tree WILL be picked; the only questions are by whom and in what order, and both are decided by the hanging.

• 03

  A tie pays nobody

  Level on a full tree and it is nobody’s — picked, closed, worthless. Sometimes killing a tree on purpose is the picker behind’s best apple: the tie is a weapon, and the tutorial spends a step on it.

• 04

  Solved, and a draw

  No dice, no deal, nothing hidden: the orchard opens bare and the whole game is the hanging — which makes it small enough to solve outright. It has been. All 1,065,278 distinct two-picker positions, brute-forced in about eleven seconds, and the value of the game is a DRAW, from every one of the six opening apples, by a margin of exactly nothing. Play it perfectly and you halve it; the whole contest is in who errs first.

• 05

  Two to four, and all three widths work

  The baskets divide the orchard exactly at every width — twelve apples each at two, eight at three, six at four — and the turn goes round the table past anybody whose basket is empty. This is on the card because it was not true: the rotation was written as arithmetic for two seats, so at three pickers the third seat never hung an apple at all while the first two hung twelve each out of baskets of eight. Four hundred orchards at each width now check that every seat acts, that every basket ends at exactly nought, and that every point on the table came from a tree somebody took outright.

• 06

  Taught by filling trees

  Five steps: the hang, the fill that takes, the tie that kills, the starving of a lost tree — and then the whole orchard to yourself.