Fairies of Meadowkeep

Fairies of Meadowkeep is a game you play on your mobile device using Google Keep, which is usually a pre-installed app on Android devices, but can be added to iOS phones as well. No internet connection is required, but the app may give you an annoying notification when you're in offline mode. Hopefully that won't screw anything up.

~~ SETTING UP THE GAME ~~

Open Google Keep, and make sure you're in tiled mode, so the cards are in two columns. (The icon to switch display modes is in the upper right, near your avatar.)

Create the following Keep cards: 2 Pond, 6 Meadow, 2 Path, a Player 1 and a Player 2 card. If you already have cards in Google Keep, make sure to pin all of these cards so they appear at the top of the app.

For the 2 Path cards, just type Path in the title, turn the card gray, and you're done.

For the 2 Player cards, Type Player 1 and Player 2 (or whatever names you choose) in the title, then each player chooses an emoji to add in the body of the card. After typing the emoji, press Enter 3 times, so there are exactly 4 lines in the card's body text. Feel free to color these cards if you'd like, but try to avoid blue, green, and gray.

The rest of the cards are going to have hidden characters in them, and we need to make sure those characters aren't shown in the preview, which means we need to add 10 blank lines before typing the characters.

For the 6 Meadow cards, type Meadow in the title, and in the body, hit Enter 10 times, followed by either ❌ or 🧚‍♀️. When you exit out of the card, you should only see "…" at the bottom of the card, not the emoji you added. You can do 3 fairies and 3 X cards, or whatever balance you prefer.

For the 2 Pond cards, type Pond in the title, then add 10 lines the same way you did with the Meadow cards, but with one of the ponds, add a single fairy, and in the other, add 3 fairies.

Here are what the cards should look like while you're making them. Note the cursor at the bottom of the Player card, showing how far down the cursor should go to get the right size card.

Shuffle these cards around so you forget which ones contain fairies, and then arrange the cards so there are 3 Meadows and 1 Pond up top, followed by the two Player cards side by side, then the two path cards, and the rest of the Meadows and the final Pond card. Here's a simple example layout:

~~ PLAYING THE GAME ~~

Decide who goes first, then for each turn, press and hold your Player card and move it to a space adjacent to where it currently is. The environment will magically transform around you as you move! Both players should be watching the screen during your move, to make sure nothing sneaky's going down.

After you've moved, you may open one card that's adjacent to your Player card to see its contents, while the other player isn't looking. After you close the card, it's time for them to move while both of you watch, and then they get to open one adjacent card while you look away.

This goes on for 10 moves, and when you're finished, take a look at the scrambled playing field. Now it's time to count up your points!

~~ SCORING THE GAME~~

Open up all the cards that are touching your Player card (including diagonally adjacent cards), and count up the fairies within. Meadow and Pond cards with a 🧚 emoji give you 1 point each, and the one Pond with 3 fairies gives you 3 points.

The player with the most fairies adjacent to their card wins!

Feel free to experiment with different kinds of cards and numbers of fairies! Maybe an Ogre card that subtracts 2 fairies from your count? And there's a good chance that the 3-fairy Pond card is a terrible idea, so maybe we'll change that one at some point.