How a Century is played

What shall we do today?

Choose. Do it. Get it signed.

Every morning of every trip asks the first question. A Century answers it a hundred times over, for one place, in a book the player carries. This is what it is like to play one — one adventure shown whole, the five steps from the first day to the coin, and the Century Companion that keeps track of what is left.

Friends laughing together at a Hawaiian Century adventure kiosk, with the large Adventures Wheel, Passbooks and the ocean below Diamond Head.

The Century in play

Above all, this is fun.

The Wheel breaks the stalemate. The Passbook preserves the story. Friends choose, laugh, go, return, and sign the memory into the record.

ChooseGoLaughRemember

See a Century in full →

This is one of the Hundred.

Every Century is a hundred adventures written for one place. This one belongs to an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine.

Islesboro, Maine · The Table

Participate in the Lobster Muster

The day that opens the season. Ten to twelve dozen live lobsters come in by boat to the dock. Tonight’s dinner goes on the table; the rest is picked, packed and frozen, so lobster is on hand all summer in whatever form the cook likes.

A Lobster King and Queen are elected and given their bibs. The boil water is carried back to the sea it came from. The shells go to the hydrangeas. The day closes with a toast on the dock — lobster season is open at BallyMagauran.

Ninety-nine more like it.

One of a hundred

One adventure, written out in full in the Passbook — the standard of completion, the categories it closes, the lines for the date and the signature. Ninety-nine others sit beside it, each one chosen by a Founder who belongs to the place.

How the Hundred is played

Choose. Do it. Get it signed.

A hundred adventures, chosen one at a time and signed one at a time, ending in a coin. Nobody finishes in a week, and nobody is meant to.

Choose an adventure

Any unfinished adventure in the book, in any order — or let the Wheel decide when nobody can agree.

Do it

It happens in the world, on foot, with whoever is there.

III

Get it signed

Someone who was there signs the Passbook. Every adventure is earned one signature at a time.

Close out a category

When a whole group of adventures is finished, the stamp is struck in the book.

Become a Centurion

All one hundred, the coin, and a name entered by hand in the Book of the Centurion.

Person, Place and Time

Every Century is built for one place and no other.

Place

The hundred is drawn from the place itself — its water, its kitchens, its trails, the days it celebrates — by a Founder who belongs to it.

Time

The hundred belongs to a lifetime rather than to a season. Some adventures exist only in August, some only at low tide, some only once.

Person

A grandmother and a ten-year-old work the same hundred and reach it differently. Every adventure is graded easy, moderate or difficult, and the Wheel filters to the day they actually have.

What a player ends up with

The book is the game and the record at the same time.

A Passbook is the board a player plays on, with the Hundred printed inside it. It is also the record of what was done, the journal it was written in, and the keepsake that gets kept. By the end it is battered, written in, signed by a dozen people and stamped seven times, and it belongs to its owner for life.

Beside it stands the Chronicle, lying open, where anyone may write down a discovery, a tradition worth keeping, or an adventure the next edition should carry. The player keeps the Passbook. The place keeps the Chronicle.

The Chronicle is how a Century hears back from the people who played it. The stamps and the Companion say what got done and what nobody chose. The Chronicle says what they loved, and it is the one part a guest writes in their own hand. Both go into the yearly review that sets the next edition. The hundred is fixed inside an edition and it grows between them, and every edition records what changed. A Century is played today and read in fifty years, which is why the Hundred is only half of what is being built.

The Century Companion

The digital counterpart of the physical Wheel.

The Wheel on the wall carries the whole hundred. The Companion carries what one player has left of it — filtered to where they are, to the hours they have, and to what the day can reach — and it empties as the Century fills. Nothing marked in it counts toward the Century. The Passbook, its witnesses, its stamps and its seal remain the only proof of what was done. A player can also propose an adventure from the Companion. It arrives in the Chronicle inbox of the Century’s King or Queen to be entered or returned with thanks, so the same feedback reaches the yearly review whether it was written at the Desk or on a phone.

Two boards run beside it. The scoreboard ranks this year and resets when the year does; the leaderboard is lifetime and never resets. In the first year they read the same, and they come apart after that. A player chooses once, when their account is set up, whether to take part in ongoing contests, and nobody who declines loses anything.

Each Century opens through its own door, unlocked by the key printed in its Passbook, so a player arrives at their own hundred.

Open the Wheel →

The Century System — the company behind it →