Drover's Autumn: A Trail Survival Game

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.
2. The drove sets out. The card loads with the whole autumn's d20 tape printed and boots you at the township with sixty cattle, two hands and a dog.
3. One order a day. Name a pace or a rest, choose how to cross the sea strait and the rivers, and buy what you can at three stores.
4. Sell at Falkirk, then check. Reach the tryst by day 20 or 21 and sell. Every day's arithmetic is printed; rebuild the tape at aigamecards.com/verify and check it.

Questions

Can ChatGPT run a survival game without fudging the dice?

Not on its own: a chat model's dice are words it writes, so a roll can bend to suit the story and nothing records the one it chose. This card prints all forty d20 values before you start, from the seed cattle-trail:1.0.0, the same for every player and every replay of this edition, and reads exactly one a day: day 7 is the seventh value, whatever you do. The card makes the AI show the raw value every day, and on a march or a crossing the shift and the band, and you can rebuild the tape at aigamecards.com/verify, so the dice are ones you can check. A fixed tape proves the weather did not move; the printed arithmetic is how you check each ruling.

Can we actually lose, and is it the same every time?

Yes, you can lose. Push every day and the party is worn out between day 6 and day 8; walk at the grazing pace all the way and the tryst is over before you arrive; either ending scores 0. Every drove on this edition meets the same autumn, fixed by the card's id and version, so a replay differs only by your choices. Played blind, a family that walks steady every day scores from 0 to 42 on this tape: about 17 to 20 with one boat and meal from the stores, 37 to 42 with two boats; a drove that buys no meal usually gives out on the road. The best plan this tape allows scores 96.

Is it a real historical survival game we can use in class?

The island, the road and the people are invented, and the card says so. The trade is real, and every line the card states as history is checked against A. R. B. Haldane's The Drove Roads of Scotland and Eric Cregeen's Recollections of an Argyllshire Drover (Scottish Studies, 1959), a drover's own account. Real droves lost far fewer beasts than this road takes, and the card says that too. It is rated all ages: cattle losses are told in one plain line, people, the drover too, are taken in at farms to mend, the dog may run off home, and nobody dies. It plays best with a teacher or parent at the keyboard and the class voting on each day's order.

How long is it, and can we stop between lessons?

Twenty days on the road, one reply each, about 40 to 60 minutes. Say "save" and the card prints a block with every number in it; start a new chat, paste the card and the block, and the drove resumes on the same morning, reading the same next value.

What if the chat can't open links?

The chat must be able to open a link to load the full card, or you paste the full card text into the chat yourself; the whole autumn's tape is inside it. The opening alone is not enough to play a day, and the card tells the AI to stop and ask for the rest.