#token game

[orsolare]

Have you been waiting long for me?

[renard-dartigue]

Past Self

[effieotto]

can we address the connection between the importance of tokens in Haymitch’s life and how he always linked them with the people he loved, and the fact Effie’s surname is Trinket? Or we had enough?

[alchemyfreak321]

Give and Emergence by Sleep Token

[kaddyssammlung]

WE HAVE NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!

There is a code in the German website with a phone number and when you call that number then you get this message:

Thank you anon :)

I recorded the message if someone wants to hear it.

According to twitter the morse code spells out: endurance and end / end...

[vulcanette]

⚔️⚔️⚔️ maximum chaos ⚔️⚔️⚔️

🎥: @ highwatermain

[k9ofthesavior]

working on hades!ii and i couldnt resist making his dialogue his paradiddle quote hehe

[glitterghost]

Vessel thinking anyone could ever forget him? Sir, you are permanently etched into all our ears, minds, and hearts. Like fuck, I don't think anyone could forget you even if they wanted to.

[mantimae]

Breaking news!! Local mall teens loiter and buy NOTHING.

Bonus bg pic bc Steph’s hair covered it all lol (I didn’t put a whole lotta effort in the bg lines but the lighting was fun and I wanted to show it off <3)

[sleepiestoken]

[bunnieswithknives]

Astronomer thoughts.....

[orsolare]

additionally, he’s a big fan of the standard paradiddle!

Hades 2 style Vessel

Hades 2 style III

IV coming soon :)

[renard-dartigue]

"Won't you join me in worship?"

Uh oh. My hand slipped and I combined two hyperfixations.

Here is Vessel in Touchstarved. A cultist who shows interest in the MC after Sleep tells him to reach out. MC thinks it's a weird sex cult but soon learns that Vessel is just a music nerd who wants them to join his band.

[foxholecourt22]

As much as I think Kevin is definitely some type of queer it would be really funny if he was straight and kinda just Like That

[kitchipon]

A clearing in the forest ✿

[marlynnofmany]

Similar Skill Sets

“Aw, man,” I muttered, staring at the board game. “Was it this one or that one? I was trying to get over here, but you moved that row. I think it’s this one?” My finger hovered over the switch on one nearly-identical tile among many.

Captain Sunlight gave away nothing, her scaly yellow face serene. “Make your move.”

“It already smells like a flower shop threw up in here.” I struggled with the switch, my human fingernail barely up to the task usually meant for Heatseeker claws. When it finally clicked, the tile spurted a weak jet of scent. This one smelled more leafy than flowery, but I still had no flaming idea if it was the one I was trying to find. I sniffed the scent compartment of the token I’d drawn, hoping they matched. Leafy? Vines, maybe?

“I’m sorry it’s such an old model,” said Captain Sunlight, taking pity on me and drawing her next token. “The scents are fainter than they should be. Maybe we can get replacement cartridges at the next station.”

I sighed as I watched her make three moves in a row, matching up scented tiles and rearranging the maze of the board until I’d lost all idea of where my target was. “Somehow I don’t think that would help.”

She sat back, idly spinning the last token she needed to find. “I wonder if there’s a model with scents from your planet. This is a pretty popular game; it only makes sense that they would branch out.”

“Maybe.” I stared at the maze, plotting pathways and trying to find a target that I could reach in a single turn. My odds weren’t great that it would be the right one, but that was better than nothing. “I’d probably be able to tell them apart better if they were things like cinnamon and citrus, but if the game makers just went for all flowers there too, I’d still be guessing. It’s not my area of expertise.” I shifted a row and moved my piece, then spent a moment trying once again to identify a scent.

“That’s the one you tried last time,” Captain Sunlight told me, dashing all hopes. Her next move was swift and decisive, countering the detour I’d just thrown in her path. She set her final token on the stack of others and waggled her fingers in silent triumph.

I slumped against the backrest. “This is definitely not my game.”

The captain began disassembling the board. “How about you pick the next one?”

“My pleasure,” I said in relief, immediately moving toward the entertainment cabinet. This lounge was well stocked after our last stop. “Want to do a puzzle?”

“What kind? Cube, sphere, string?”

“Uh, the regular flat kind,” I said, holding up the box. It showed a lovely nature scene (waterfall), a piece count (100), and a planet of origin (Earth).

“That sounds refreshingly different,” said Captain Sunlight. She carefully fitted the scent tiles into their insulated compartment. “Competitive or cooperative?���

“Cooperative,” I said, bringing it over to the table while she finished putting away the other game. “Though I suppose there’s room for trash talk about who’s working faster.”

“How very considerate. Have you played this with Trrili or Zhee yet?”

“Not yet,” I said with a smile, easily able to imagine the amount of agitated hissing and pincher clicks that would come from a competitive game between those two. “This one’s new. I was thinking Blip and Blop might like it.” The Frillian twins were also competitive, though they worked well together. I had no idea if they were any good at puzzles.

Time to see if the captain was. She set aside the other box and I opened this one, spilling the hundred puzzle pieces onto the table and getting to work flipping them over.

Captain Sunlight followed my lead. “So is the goal to assemble them in a certain pattern?”

“Yeah, they make up this picture.” I pointed at the box. “It’s easiest once they’re all color-side up.”

“I see,” she said, as focused as if she was studying a new trade language. “How long do you expect this round to take?”

“This one should be pretty quick,” I told her. “It’s just a hundred pieces, and a lot of different colors. If this was a picture of a green field with a blue sky and not much else, that would be a lot more annoying.”

“Seems like that would be less to keep track of.”

“Sure, but fewer clues about where things go.” I held up a fragment of vivid purple. “This one, for example, can only go in the corner. No mystery there.” I pointed out the matching flower on the box.

Captain Sunlight nodded, still looking serious. “Right. Deduction. So do we take turns?”

“Nah, that would take too long. It’s more fun just to go for it. Unless you want to make it harder?”

“No no, the regular way is fine.” She hurried to flip over the last few, then looked at me and waited.

“Righto. The best way to start is by finding the corners first, then the edges. It narrows things down. Do you see any corners? Here’s one.”

We began. It really was an easy puzzle, but I could see the captain was struggling. This was a surprise, to say the least. Sunlight was smart. Always thinking ahead, clever and levelheaded and full of insights, but she seemed to have trouble guessing which direction a piece should go, even when it was perfectly obvious to me.

“Oh hey,” I said. “I was looking for that one. It goes right here.”

“This way?”

“Turn it so the sticking-out bit goes … yeah, like that.”

“And is this one also part of this red patch?”

“No, that one has smaller red petals; it belongs in the other spot. I JUST saw the piece that fits it, too; that was overrrrr… Here it is!” I plucked it out of the mess and Captain Sunlight handed me the other piece, letting me put them where they belonged.

I suggested, “See if you can find all the speckled blue ones, and we can fill in this area.”

She gamely searched for blue among the chaos of colors, visibly scanning pieces one at a time with concentration on her lizardy face. I hesitated over whether to pretend I couldn’t see all five of the pieces we needed, or to speed things up. I settled on grabbing material for the grassy area nearby, only picking out the last blue one when she’d found the rest.

This turned into a pattern of me asking for pieces in a certain color, which she gathered slowly and I assembled. The puzzle took about three times as long to finish as I’d thought.

“Success!” the captain said as she clicked the last piece into place. (I’d left it for her to do the honors.) “That was surprisingly challenging. I must say, I’m glad it wasn’t competitive.”

“Ah, you wouldn’t have lost as badly as I did in that last game,” I said, lying through my human teeth.

“That’s kind of you to say,” she told me. “I do wonder how some of the rest of the crew would take to this, though. Mur is always looking for a difficult game he can excel at.”

“Because you usually beat him?” I guessed with a grin, quieting when I picked up the sound of tentacles approaching down the hallway.

A blue-black squid head appeared around the corner. “I hear it’s game time in here!” Mur declared. “And we have new puzzles after the last stop.”

“Do you mean this puzzle?” I asked, gesturing at the completed waterfall. “Lemme just take it back apart—”

Mur ignored me, tentacle-walking over to fling open the cabinet and reach in. “These puzzles!” he exclaimed, pulling out several Strongarm puzzle cubes. “We’ve got a range of difficulty levels here. These two are unsuited to fingers, but I imagine you poor souls with no tentacles could manage one of these!”

He lined them up along the edge of the table with all the flair of a children’s magician, or maybe an older sibling who was looking forward to seeing the younger kids suffer. Since I’d been subjected to the Strongarm version of a “simple kid’s challenge” before and nearly dislocated something, that seemed appropriate.

I sighed and exchanged looks with Captain Sunlight. She didn’t seem particularly excited either.

Then more tentacles slapped down the hall, and Wio joined us. “Hey! Kavlae says it’s puzzle time! I told Mimi to take a break from the tool-sorting he’s been doing, and we can see who’s puzzle master today.”

The look I exchanged with Captain Sunlight now was different. “Let me just clear the table for you,” I said, picking up the puzzle box.

“Yes, by all means,” said the captain. “You can have my chair.”

~~~

These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.

Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.

The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).