Bergschrund

How to start

1. Open your AI. Start a new chat in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. No paid plan required.
2. Paste the card. The card carries the dice tape and boots 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 ledger 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?

It is picking what to spend, and the three paces are never a right answer and two wrong ones. No hazard band ever costs or returns daylight, so running always leaves you exactly one more point of day and one less point of your own warmth than working, and belaying always buys a safer read for a point of day you will want later. Around that sits the rest: a hot brew, an hour digging out a buried cache, one of three radio calls that has base read the next two numbers and take the better. Twenty-four points of day, nine legs, and it will not cover all of it. Two legs also put a second decision inside the leg — clip a fifteen-year-old fixed rope or downclimb it, and at the schrund, 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 and the card says so out loud. The tape is published; pretending otherwise would be the dishonest version. It is worth a few points, not the game. The best line found on this tape scores 96, 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.