The standards and licensing company behind every Century.
We teach the Founder, review the Hundred against the Standard, supply the objects and grant the name. A Century belongs to the place that built it. The Standard belongs to us, and it is the reason the name is worth carrying.
The Standard decides which Hundreds may carry the name at all
A hotel, a family, a museum or a company licenses the right to build a Century for their own place. We supply the structure — the type, the categories, and the finished prototype closest to their situation — and work alongside their own people to build the hundred adventures that suit that place. The finished Hundred is then approved against the Standard, the objects are supplied, and the name is granted. People are certified — Founders, Keepers and reviewers. Hundreds are approved. The name is granted, and it can be taken back.
Where to see it played.
The game is explained on one page and shown in full on another. Both are one click away.
The Hawaiʻi page is the exhibit. It is written for a traveler — the customer-facing face of a finished Century, so you can see what a licensee actually hands across a counter.
We teach each client to build a Century that could only belong to them.
The people who know a place are the ones who should name its hundred adventures — what to eat, where to walk, what only happens one month a year.
The Century System licenses a standardized way to turn a place into a Century: a hundred adventures worth doing, chosen by the people who know the place, and signed one at a time as they are done. The company teaches the client’s own person to build that hundred, reviews it against the Standard, supplies the objects and grants the name. The first market is multi-property hospitality, and the same licensed system can be adapted to a family, a company, a nonprofit, a museum or a place. The Standard is the same in every one. The commercial terms are not.
What the company does
Teach the Founder
The curriculum already exists in the Founder’s Manual, and can be taught to a group of general managers before any of their Centuries is built. The Founder is always the client’s own person, and choosing the Hundred is the part the company never does for them. The same course trains the Keeper who runs it at the desk, and that certification belongs to the person rather than the property.
Review the Hundred
Every hundred is read against the Standard before it is published, so that a player opening any Passbook, in any place, finds a hundred worth doing.
Supply the objects
Passbooks, Wheels, coins, the stamp set, the embosser and the Book of the Centurion. Recurring production against dies cut once and used thereafter. The desk, the counter and the store are the licensee's; we supply what sits on them.
Grant the name
The name and the marks are licensed to the client for the term. They are the one asset the company can take back, and every license depends on that.
Each of the four does a different job. The training makes the work repeatable, the review protects the Standard, the objects bring recurring production, and the name is the thing being licensed.
- The problem
- Every morning of every trip begins with the same question: what shall we do today? A Century answers it a hundred times over, in a book the guest is carrying. The hundred things actually worth doing in a place live in the heads of the people who work there, and a Century is how they get into print and into a guest’s hands.
- The objects, and who makes them
- The Standard names six constitutional objects — the Wheel, the Passbook, the Coin, the Book of the Centurion, the Chronicle and the Desk. That is what a Century contains, not what arrives in a box. We manufacture the printed pieces and the instruments of authority: Passbooks, Wheels, coins, the stamp set, the embosser and the Book of the Centurion. The Desk is the licensee’s, and so is the counter and the store if they ever build them. We supply what sits on the desk.
- What a client buys
- The license. That is the Hundred written for their place, the objects made to standard, the training that turns their own people into founders, and the right to carry the name. A license arrives with the prototype Century closest to the client’s situation — the categories drawn, the grades set, a hundred worked examples — so a Founder never faces a blank page. What the client supplies is the local knowledge no outsider has.
- The first market
- Operators holding several properties in one destination. They have restaurants, cabanas, tour desks and beachfront to fill across a walkable area, a marketing team already in place, and a reason to be different from the hotel next door.
- Who buys
- A licensee buys the right to found and run a Century for its place — a hotel group, a nonprofit, a museum, a company. A traveler buys the Passbook and the experience from that licensee. A family or an ancestral buyer commissions a Century from the company directly, and for them the commission and the license are one transaction. Different transactions, one business, and each side makes the other worth more.
- Where it goes next
- A family keeps its traditions written down and played by grandparents and teenagers at the same time. A company gets a year-long program for about the cost of one facilitated team day. A nonprofit or a museum gets participation instead of passive membership. An ancestral buyer gets a hundred places a documented family line can go and stand. Each of those is a volume of its own.
- What the licensee earns
- The Outfitters Guide is the licensee’s own book of who provides each adventure. It sits beside the Passbook and never inside it. Placement in the Guide may be sold. Inclusion in the Hundred never is. The licensee sells that placement and keeps every dollar. Every adventure also sends someone somewhere local — a market, a captain, a shop — so the host, the guest and the town earn at the same time.
- What the company earns
- Three lines carry the business. The license, paid to found the Century. The Annual Century License & Review, which pays for the yearly review that keeps the Hundred current. The reorders — Passbooks bought again whenever a licensee runs out, printed against dies cut once and used thereafter. Everything after that is additional: training, the printed volumes and merchandising royalties. The company takes no money from providers: no placement fee, no referral, no share.
A hotel license is a founding fee with an Annual Century License & Review each year after, on a three-year term. A family license runs a few thousand dollars. Final terms depend on the application and are worked through with each Founder before anything is settled.
How a Century is founded
The company is being built as a licensing and training company that publishes books in support of that work. The curriculum sits in one book, so a Founder is taught rather than hired, and reviewers are then certified against the same Standard, so a Hundred is not read by one person forever. Each step makes the method less dependent on anyone in particular.
The Century Standard
A set of editorial tests by which a Hundred is judged: whether each adventure was chosen through independent judgment rather than commercial influence, whether any adventure promotes a brand, whether the difficulty structure steers a participant toward anything that profits from being chosen, and whether the Founder has adopted the Pledge. The tests are objective, repeatable and teachable, which is what allows the Standard to be applied by people other than its author. They live in the Founder’s Manual and nowhere else.
Anybody can build a hundred. The lists a traveler already uses sell spots on them — a booking platform charges for placement, a guidebook takes sponsorship. The company earns on the license, the objects and the training, so it has nothing to sell inside the Hundred and can leave it alone.
The program behind it is complex, and the System is what makes it look simple. Building your own means building the whole structure. The categories, the grades, the standards of completion, the training, the dies and the tooling all exist before the first book is printed, and the bill lands then. A license buys that work already done, at a price known going in. The name, the marks and the copyrights come with it. Hotels already license capability this way: InterContinental gives every guest at its 242 hotels an outside company’s jet-lag plan, and keeps the guest, the brand and the pricing. A Century is licensed on the same terms.
A Century evolves. The reports show what guests finish and what they never touch. The Founder cuts and adds. The hundred in year five is better than the one the Founder started with.
The Founder’s first job is to recognize the Century already taking shape in the life of the place. Do not invent. Harvest. That is the difference between a Century and a hundred fun things somebody typed up in an office.
One system, demonstrated six ways.
Seven volumes written, with six complete hundreds among them and the Nonprofit’s twenty-five, every instrument specified to the die, and a working Companion application — all of it done before any outside capital was raised.
- The system
- The Founder’s Manual, which is the curriculum as well as the book; the Century Standard the Hundred is read against; and the certification and licensing structure.
- The products
- The Passbook, the Adventures Wheel, the coin and its dies, the category stamps, the Book of the Centurion, and the Century Companion — designed and specified to the die, with the maker’s instructions ready to go to production.
- The demonstrations
- Two are ready now: the BallyMagauran Century, Cape Cod Edition, the family game written out in full and live on the Wheel, and the Hawaiʻi Century, written in full for a regional market. Four more are by conversation — the City, the Nonprofit, the Corporate and the Ancestral Centuries carry the same method to a city, a charity, a company and a family line, and each is written to the point where a Founder could begin.
Seven volumes carry the system: the Manual teaches it, and each of the others is one kind of Century — who founds it, what they license, and why it is worth having.
See the seven volumes →The Passbook
The board a guest plays on, the record of what they did, the journal they wrote it in, the keepsake they keep for life, and the only proof that counts. Dated, witnessed, stamped, and finally sealed.
The Wheel
The physical instrument at the center of every Century, built for the Desk, the kiosk or the Exchange. When no one can decide what the day should be, the Wheel decides. The Companion carries its counterpart in a player’s pocket.
The Coin
The die instructions are finished and can be cut at any time. Each Century has its own die, and every reorder for that Century strikes against it.
The Book of the Centurion
The permanent roll. Every Centurion of a place, entered by hand.
The Century Companion is the digital counterpart of the physical Wheel. It carries the adventures a player has left, filtered to where they are and to the hours they have, while the Passbook stays the only proof of what was done. A working prototype is open here: open the Wheel →