Last Wednesday I went to this month’s Dirty Rectangles, a game dev meet-up I’ve been going to, at the local punk/nerd bar. A few people usually present videogames they’re working on, or game adjacent projects (somebody a few months ago presented an alternative he was working on to Unity Version Control, for example). Then people usually mill around and chat about the nature of games.

This month Lintilion presented a few paper and dice games they had recently invented. I was really fascinated by one of them, which they christened “Number Pyle”. As I understand it, the name is a play on the piles of numbers that the game generates, but with an old-timey looking spelling to suit the blackletter font that was pre-selected in ms-paint when they presented.

I’ve been on the lookout for little projects to fill out my github and keep up my React skills, so I got permission to make a browser game using the “Number Pyle” rule set. That said, I didn’t think I’d get to it any time soon.

This Saturday afternoon I got a seasonal vaccine double dose (covid shot in the left arm, flu shot in the right). As soreness and sleepiness started taking hold, I abandoned my original plan of spending the rest of the day sewing. I sat down at my computer thinking I would make a boilerplate React app and a git repository for later before taking a nap, but I ended up going into some kind of vaccine induced fugue state and suddenly it was 1am and I had a working “Number Pyle” browser game.

Sunday morning I cleaned up the UI a bit, added a dialog with instructions on how to play, and deployed the app to github pages to share with the Dirty Rectangles discord.

Today (Monday) I set up a variant of “Number Pyle” which I call “Number Pyre”, which is exactly the same except it includes a mechanic to “bank” a roll to switch out for a later roll.

Anyway, if you are curious about the mysterious game of Number Pyle, click one of the links below to choose a variant.