House Can’t Stop Winning

House Can't Stop Winning was made for the Appendix Group show by Charm School in August 2024. The game is actually three separate games but unify and feed into eachother's systems. The first game, Underdogs, takes place in five homeless encampments, where each player is desparately rolling dice to evade the police and collect enough material to pay off the House and immigrate to the second game Grinders. The second game, Grinders, takes place in a factory society, where multiple players get six dice they roll each day. On a good day, the dice is mostly fives or sixes. On a bad day, the choices are slimmer- more 1s and 2s. At critical junctions, you choose one of your energy die to determine if  a moment will go good or bad for you, with your ultimate goal to start a grindcore band (once you get the seed money). The freedoms you hold dear are built on instability and chance, and the moment something goes bad- that can lead to a downward spiral. Though you're paid by the House, you pay them for more energy dice, your very survival, they control how you produce your own culture. The third game, Houses, is a poker-like where two competing players gamble for the winnings of the House, the accumulation of payments and surplus the other games produce. Though they aren't allies, the two Houses certainly stand to gain the most from this rotten system.

These three games were played over the course of the night of August 28th and ended in a sorry state- the homeless encampments were full, with too much energy dice and not enough able to afford it, while the House pile was full of chips, so much so that they spilled over the edges of the game.

Since the three games were originally composed of found material like old Monopoly boards and miniaturized magnetic football fields, I've created some files you could download to play this game at home. The pdf attached (definitely would recommend printing the Printer Friendly version) is scaled to 77 inches by 22.5 inches, so if you'd like to print this I'd recommend printing it as a poster (yielding about 30 pages). Then best to tape these pages together and cut out the hexes for use with Houses (though personally, any gambling game for the pot is appropriate, these hexes are just in case you don't have a deck of cards). Or print at whatever size works best.