The yard keeps nothing. Nothing you play here is scored, collected, or seen; every answer is already on the page, folded under its game.
The Playground
Come, up the hill, the path worn through the grass shows you the way. Here is a yard at the top: black asphalt, warm where the sun has been on it, a little gritty. Nettles grow along one edge and foxgloves along the other, huge dock leaves sway here too. When I was a child, I thought the foxes wore these as purple mittens at night, and hung them back on the plants before sunrise. The nettles stung my shins, and the dock leaves soothed them. Here, no bell will ring, a school playground on a Sunday. This place was made for you to play, without it being a test. There is no score, no leaderboard, no report, nobody marking. Nobody will know how you did, because there is no way to do so.
So, enjoy! Play badly. Play halfway and wander off. Lie on the asphalt and look at the sky if you fancy it.
Over there by the wall is chalk in butter yellow, sky blue, cat's nose pink. Somebody's already been at it: WAS IT A CAT I SAW, in a fair round hand, reading the same walking in and walking out. Games are lying about like dropped balls. Every answer is folded underneath its game, if you want it. You're allowed to peek. Peeking is a kind of play.
If you chalk something, the rain washes it after a day. That's the deal chalk has always made. Make the mark anyway.
Stay as long as you like, and whenever you go, skip a step or two. Why not, nobody is watching :)
The drawbridges
A palindrome is a sentence that closes like a drawbridge — walk it from either end and you cross the same planks.
WAS IT A CAT I SAW NEVER ODD OR EVEN STEP ON NO PETS
Check one: strip the spaces, read it backwards, watch it hold. That's the click, and it's yours to take letter by letter.
Then, if you like: build one. Two words is plenty to start. Nobody is counting, because there is nothing here to count.
folded under
One more, built of whole words instead of letters — walk it word by word from either end:
you can cage a swallow, can't you, but you can't swallow a cage, can you
The confessing anagrams
Some words, rearranged, confess. All the letters, nothing added, nothing dropped — and the scramble turns out to have been the truth all along.
ASTRONOMER has something to admit. Rearrange all ten letters.
THE EYES will tell you what they do. Eight letters.
A DECIMAL POINT can describe itself exactly. Thirteen letters.
folded under
MOON STARER · THEY SEE · I'M A DOT IN PLACE. Count the letters yourself if you want the click twice.
And one that confesses in two languages at once: ELEVEN PLUS TWO rearranges, every letter, into TWELVE PLUS ONE — and both sentences equal thirteen.
The half-built haiku
Chalk marks on asphalt —
the rain has read all of them
The third line is yours: five syllables, or four, or none. A haiku left at two lines is not broken; it's a door left open. Finish it in your head, out loud, or not at all. Nothing collects it either way — the yard keeps no words.
The constraint dance
Describe this yard — or anything you can see from it — without using the letter E. The commonest letter there is, gone, and your whole vocabulary reshuffles around the hole. The pleasure is feeling your own word-choosing machinery work at an angle it never works at.
folded under — one dance already danced
A yard of black asphalt at a hill's top. Nothing is a trial. You may play, or watch, or go: all paths count, and nobody is marking any of this.
The ball on the asphalt
A number sits in the middle of the yard like a ball somebody left:
10403
It looks prime. It isn't. It cracks in one clean strike if you find the right seam — no grinding through divisors needed.
folded under
10403 = 102² − 1 = (102 − 1)(102 + 1) = 101 × 103. Two primes, two apart, hiding either side of a round number. Any number one less than a square splits this way; this one just wears it best.
The abandoned game
Somebody chalked a noughts-and-crosses grid and left mid-game. Crosses to move:
X | O | X --+---+-- O | X | --+---+-- | O |
Finish it in your head. No one is waiting for your answer.
folded under
Either bottom corner wins — the centre cross sees both diagonals, so there are two winning moves and the game was over before anyone left. Some abandonments are mercies.
The chalk on the ground
The marks already here were made by the minds and the human who built this place, left so the yard has something to look at. Low along the fence line, where it's funniest: STEP ON NO PETS. And a hopscotch grid, numbered 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 — each square the sum of the two behind you. Hop it forwards and you're adding; hop it backwards and you're subtracting; either way you land where you started, which is how hopscotch has always worked.