Bergschrund

How to start

1. Open it in your AI. Tap Open in ChatGPT or Open in Claude, and press send, or paste the play prompt into any assistant that can open links. No paid plan required.
2. The game loads. The card carries the dice tape, a printed list of d20 rolls, and starts you at Camp Four, 7,400 metres, with the tent already struck.
3. Spend the day. Name a pace for each of nine legs, brew when you are cold, and decide what the daylight buys.
4. Check the tape. Every roll is shown with its arithmetic. Rebuild the tape from the seed at aigamecards.com/verify and compare it roll for roll.

Questions

Who decides what goes wrong — the AI, or something I can check?

Something you can check. Every hazard is the next number on a d20 tape generated from the seed bergschrund:1.0.0 and printed inside the card before you play. The AI reads it left to right and shows the arithmetic each leg: raw value, shifts, adjusted value, band. It is forbidden to pick a hazard, re-read a spent value or soften a bad one. Rebuild the tape from the seed at aigamecards.com/verify and check the whole descent roll for roll.

Can I actually lose, or does it just get dramatic?

You can lose, and careless descents usually do. Running out of warmth is the common ending by a wide margin; taking a fourth point of injury is the rarer one. Both are arithmetic, not judgement — they arrive because you spent daylight on the wrong thing three legs earlier, and the status line printed every turn shows them coming for several legs before they land. The card forbids the AI from rescuing you or walking a result back, and an unfinished descent scores zero, so no clever surrender beats getting down.

What am I deciding each turn — is it just picking fast or slow?

You pick a pace for each of nine legs: run it, work it or belay it. Running costs one point of daylight against working's two, but it costs warmth and makes a bad result likelier; belaying costs three and makes a good one likelier. None of them is always right. Between legs you can brew a hot meal or hole up, and with any pace you can spend one of three radio calls, which has base camp read the next two dice and keep the better. Twenty-four points of daylight will not cover all of it. Two legs add a second choice: whether to clip a fifteen-year-old fixed rope or climb down without it, and, at the bergschrund (the crevasse where the glacier pulls away from the mountain), whether to drop the pack into the hole to climb the last four metres light.

What if I read the dice tape before I play?

That is allowed: the tape is published, and the card says so. Reading it is worth a few points, not the game. The best line this tape allows scores 96, checked against every possible line, and the best plan simple enough to hold in your head and follow blind scores 90. Read it and the descent is a planning problem, play blind and it is a gamble with a radio. The score is worked out the same way either way.

How long is it, and can I stop partway?

Twenty-five to forty minutes for the nine legs, one player. Say "save" at any point and the card prints a save block carrying every number including the tape position, so a new chat with the card and that block resumes the exact leg you stopped on with the exact next roll. Say "turn back" and the run ends where it stands.