I organized a 10-day game of tag with 10 of my friends [#70]

From Feb 21 – Mar 3, I hosted a phenomenal game of tag with 10 of my friends from TexasTableTop (UT Austin's board game club). This game had it all: deception, betrayal, ambushes, chase scenes—you know, classic tag shenanigans! I also had to walk 8.34 miles on Speedway because I lost the game. It's a great story. Let me tell you all about it.

I. Inspiration

Hoagie: "Synchronize your watches."
Callahan: "I don't know how to do that."
Randy: "I don't have a watch."
Sable: "Time is a construct."
– Tag (2018)

I was heavily inspired by Tag (2018): an action-comedy about five men who play tag every year for the month of May. Sure, it's certainly not the greatest movie of all time, but it's pretty entertaining: it's full of hijinks, absurd chase scenes, and relatively good one-liners. I was also inspired by some friends who played Assassins in their engineering org.

But to be honest: I am a massive fan of good-natured shenanigans (see #61). I wanted to make 10-day tag happen as soon as I had the idea. I needed to figure out a good set of rules though.

II: Crafting the Rules

NEW RULE: No throwing Crayola markers at people.
– Nathan Brown, player 001, in #rules

I wanted the rules of 10-day tag to ultimately be safe and non-disruptive, but also encourage people to play (and provide a strong incentive to not lose). There are a lot of small rules and technicalities outlined in the full rules (PDF), but here are the important rules:

• There are 3 taggers, who each have a Crayola marker.
• If you touch a non-tagger with your marker, they become a tagger and receive the marker.
• Players are safe and cannot be tagged:
  • in the three UT dining halls
  • in their place of residence
  • in class (more clarification in full rules)
• Every day, every player must post a selfie of themselves (in a Discord channel) standing on Speedway. The photo must
  • be taken between 3-9pm
  • be posted immediately after it's taken
  • make it clear what part of Speedway you are on
• If a player fails to post a Speedway selfie on a given day, they gain 50 points at 10pm.
  • Every player receives two "freebies": the first two days they fail to post a Speedway selfie, they don't gain points.
• At 10pm each day, every current tagger receives 100 points.
• Once the game ends, the player(s) tied for the most points must choose one of two options:
  • Take an entire SAT test proctored by Nathan (~3 hours)
  • Walk/jog/run the length of Speedway 20 times (~8.34 mi)

I think it's fun for games to have a "core element". In 10-day tag, the core element is Speedway—after all, it's the main campus road at UT.

I would later realize that the rules, while important, did not make the game awesome. It was the players who made it awesome. But I had to find players to participate in 10-day tag!

III: Persuasion & Start of the Game

If you wish to win a man over to your ideas, first make him your friend.
– Abraham Lincoln

Persuading people to play was much easier than I thought it'd be. I simply printed out 5 paper copies of the rules, and distributed them to friends during a TexasTableTop meeting. By the end of the meeting, I had 10 people who were interested, so I gathered them all together that night.

First, we all discussed and made some modifications to the rules. Then, I went on wheelofnames.com to randomly select the three taggers. Two of my friends, Sreekriti and Cooper, were chosen as taggers. But Boaz, a player who had already gone home for the weekend, was chosen as the final tagger. Since I didn't want Boaz to tank 200 points (because he wouldn't be able to tag anyone for two days), I designated myself as the final tagger. Then, I gave a different-colored marker to each tagger:

• Cooper received the red marker
• Sreekriti received the green marker
• I received the blue marker

With that, the game had officially begun. I declared that in 5 minutes, taggers were allowed to tag players. This caused most of the players to run home as fast as they could. While everyone was running home, I assembled a discord server with six channels:

• #rules: for updates to the rules
• #general: for general discussion
• #tags: for reporting tags
• #photos: for posting Speedway selfies
• #points-and-taggers: for point updates & keeping track of taggers
• #people-info: for posting (optional) info about one's schedule

I didn't know it at the time, but 10-day tag would be so much fun. This post would be extremely long if I included a day-by-day recollection of events, so I'll just talk about the highlights:

IV: Highlights

Boaz isn’t allowed to break into a bathroom stall to tag me because that would be illegal, right?
– Cooper, player 003, in #general

Here are some of the best tags that occurred during the game:

• After waiting outside the PCL for 45 minutes (while reading The Three-Body Problem, of course), I received a secret tip from my ally, Jackson, that Jackson, Sreekriti, and Julia were all walking back to San Jacinto (after eating dinner in Jester Center). So naturally, I ran all the way from the PCL to San Jacinto and somehow managed to spot and intercept them. Neither Julia nor Sreekriti saw me coming until I tagged Julia from behind. I got away successfully (much to Julia's frustration), took my Speedway photo, and chilled for the rest of the night in Jester East.
• One of my friends, who wasn't playing in 10-day tag, convinced me to study with him at the EER. I had hoped he wasn't in collaboration with a tagger. Unfortunately, while I was listening to the best Dua Lipa song of all time and working on my probability homework, I was tapped on the shoulder by a green marker. Julia had achieved revenge.
• Gia stranded Cooper in the J2 dining hall by simply following him around. Thus, Cooper called his friend to drive a car outside J2 and barely made it to his friend's car without being tagged. Reminds me of a classic Taylor Swift song...
• Boaz and I, who were both taggers at one point, waited outside Jackson's class in Welch. He left the lecture hall at 10:35am (10 minutes earlier than we expected), but thankfully, Boaz managed to spot him. We followed him around Welch for 25 minutes until 11am, when his immunity expired. I tagged Jackson first, got a photo, and then immediately ran all the way back to Jester East (a long way!) to evade Boaz, who was ~1 sec away from tagging me on at least three different points during the chase.
• After walking back from a dinner in West Campus, I received a tip from a friend (who was not playing in 10-day tag) that Jackson, who I really wanted to tag, was at Jesta' Pizza. I therefore ran all the way to Jesta' Pizza, where I found Jackson. Unfortunately, he got a head start. He almost made it back to San Jacinto (his dorm), but after a 3-minute chase while I was wearing a backpack and he wasn't, I managed to catch him at around 9:45pm.
• After I tagged Jackson near San Jacinto, I was paranoid that the other taggers might be waiting near Jester East, so I went to Clark Field. What I did not expect was a group of FIVE people (3 players; 2 non-players) to show up at 9:53pm. I did not expect one of my friends to come and tackle me to the ground. I did not expect to escape the tackle ~2 sec before Julia almost tagged me. I did not expect to somehow evade all of them in a 5-minute chase and make it back to Jester East safely. The chase was one of the most adrenaline-inducing experiences I've had in my life.
  • Unsurprisingly, a new rule was added that night to disallow practically all physical contact from the game.
• Boaz and Cooper were engaged in a standoff in the Union bathroom after immunity terminated at 9:15pm in the Union (this was after a TexasTableTop weekly meeting). Perhaps "engaged in a standoff" is a strong choice of words: Cooper somehow evaded Boaz long enough to get into a bathroom stall and waited there for 40 minutes. Even though the Union closed at 10pm that night, Cooper avoided gaining 100 points (ie. he wasn't a tagger at 10pm).

These chases and close calls were so much fun. But the real question: who won 10-day tag?

V: Statistics

I just realized that we're not playing to win but instead playing to not lose.
– Pavan, player 006, in #general

I kept an extremely accurate .txt log of everything that happened in 10-day tag. I spent ~2 hours distilling all of the data into a spreadsheet. Here's the data:

I want to point out a few of the interesting stats:

• By almost all metrics, I (player 001) lost! I spent 72% of the game being tagged, was tagged 13 times, and was the only player to lose with 500 points. I did, however, have a high efficiency rating (I spent a lot of time being tagged, but didn't rack up as many points as compared to my peers). I would also like to think that I had the most fun.
• Pavan (player 006) was the undisputed GOAT of 10-day tag. He was the only person to end the game with 0 points. Every other player had at least 200 points at the end of the game. He also missed 0 speedway selfies.
• Boaz (player 007) also somehow did not lose, despite missing 6 speedway selfies and gaining an extra 200 points as a result.
• There were 70 tags in the whole game, for an average of 7 tags/day. I'm pretty happy with that result!

If you want to dig through more stats, shoot me an email and I'll share the link to the spreadsheet.

VI: Aftermath

Now we can finally be honest with each other about everything again.
– Julia, player 005, in #general, following the end of the game

I chose to walk 8.34 miles on Speedway as my punishment. I'm a nerd, but I'm not that much of a nerd. Taking the SAT would be monumentally boring and dramatically less cool.

I completed my punishment in approximately 2.5 hours: from 4:00-6:32pm on Sunday, March 9, 2025. I am grateful that the weather was beautiful, and I am even more grateful that 11 of my friends (some in 10-day tag, some not) joined me at some point on the walk.

I am extremely grateful that 10 of my friends were willing to embark on this fun, but admittedly also crazy, game of 10-day tag. They made the game what it was: they were competitive and willing to do what it takes to win, but they were also kind, honest, and displayed good sportsmanship throughout the entire game.

It's probable that all the players in 10-day tag got less schoolwork done during the game. But I hope that the memories made up for it.

I'll echo this advice for a long time: do more (good-natured) shenanigans. Especially if you're in college—but even if you're not, still do more shenanigans! It's easy to take life too seriously.

Now I'm back to school... again. UT spring break is just about over, and while I had an awesome road trip over spring break, I really need to lock in on my linear algebra and probability classes for the last weeks in the semester. Thanks for reading!