Pantaleon Fassbender

Documentary solitaire games from the archives

Every rule and every card cites its source, and the citation opens the passage it rests on, in the original language beside an English (or for some games, German) translation. The games are short, free to play in the browser, and meant to be argued with: where the sources disagree, the game says so.

How they are made. Each game starts as an archive: a source collection built from public-domain editions, every excerpt read against the page images, the original beside a working translation, archived at Zenodo with a DOI. Where an event has no source in the collection, the card says so. Only then is the game written on top of it.

How they are tested. Every choice in a game is played out by a bot hundreds of times (Monte Carlo testing, 300–400 games per variant), and each game's strategy guide publishes the numbers: what each decision costs and what the accounting leaves out. The numbers are there so you can judge the advice, not trust it.

Now playing:

• Ad maiorem: the Society of Jesus, 1540–1773;
  
• La más alta ocasión: the Holy League and the war for Cyprus, 1570–1573;
• The Turned Standard: Manzikert, 1071;
• Nec in communi: the Franciscan poverty dispute in the early 14th century;
• Salvus conductus: Jan Hus, the Hussites, and the Council of Constance, 1412–1415;
• Řádné poslušenství: the Hussite Field Armies, 1421–1434;
• En nom Dieu: Jeanne d’Arc, 1429–1431;
• Vitalienbrüder, 1392–1401, about pirates in the Baltic Sea – in German;
• Calculemus: the Game, on the long prehistory of modern AI in philosophy;
• Ohne Hilfe und Betteln: Das Ulmer Münster, 1377–1531 – in German;
• Verhört man doch einen Dieb: Caritas Pirckheimer und der Rat, 1524–1528. Eine eigenwillige Äbtissin in Nürnberg – in German;
• Der Freiheitsbaum / The Liberty Tree – a bilingual (English and German) game about the Mainz Republic / Die Mainzer Republik, 1792–1793;
• Die Last der Grundwasser: Das Bergamt im Oberharz, 1521–1866, on mining in the Harz mountains – in German;
• Mit Volldampf ins Bröltal, 1860–1914, on the German railway boom – in German.

Would you like to share game ideas? Use this survey link: https://www.menti.com/alxo1r9g4ogg.

Designed by Dr. Pantaleon Fassbender, theologian and psychologist (M.Sc.). I also work on AI alignment and sociotechnical research.