The afternoon we invented a game with eleven rules

It had rained since breakfast, the kind of grey steady rain that makes the windows run and takes the whole day hostage. By eleven o'clock we had read everything, drawn everything, and fallen out twice. So I did what you do, which is drag the old board game down from the top of the cupboard, the one with the lid held on by a rubber band.

The rubber band, it turned out, had been doing important work. When we opened the box the rulebook was gone. There were counters, a dented tin of dice, a board soft at the folds, and no instructions anywhere. A seven year old looked at this the way an explorer looks at a blank map. Not a problem. An invitation.

We made our own rules. I want to be honest about how this went, because people imagine children inventing games as a sweet and gentle thing, and it is not. It is legislation. Rule one was simple enough: roll the dice, move that many squares. Rule two arrived within a minute: a six lets you move again, obviously. By rule five we had a square that sent you back to the start unless you were wearing socks, which I was not, and which I was told was my own fault.

The rules kept coming. If you landed on another player you could send them to the kitchen to check whether it was still raining. If it was, you got an extra turn. A red counter beat a blue one except on the bottom row, where blue ruled by ancient law that had existed for roughly four minutes. There was a rule about the dog. There was a rule that the person who made a rule could not benefit from it on the same turn, which was introduced, with great solemnity, immediately after I pointed out that every rule so far had helped the person making it.

By rule eleven I had stopped trying to win and started trying to understand. Because the thing about a child building a game in real time is that you are watching a mind decide what fairness is, out loud, with pieces. Every rule was a small argument about how the world ought to work, tested at once against the only thing that matters at that age, which is whether it feels fair to the person it just happened to.

We never finished the game. You cannot finish a game whose rules are still being written. At some point the rain eased, the light came back into the kitchen, and the board was abandoned mid law. But I have thought about that afternoon more than about plenty of proper games played properly.

The rulebook was lost, and it was the best thing that could have happened. A rulebook tells you how to play. Its absence makes you decide, square by square, what kind of people you are going to be for the next hour. We decided, in the end, to be the kind who let the sockless man off. Eventually. On appeal.

If eleven rules was only the beginning, Paper Kingdoms is a full pencil strategy game for two, with twenty printable battlegrounds and three rule sets to argue over.