Nathan Brown

I organized a 10-day game of tag with 10 of my friends

Probably the most fun shenanigan I've done in college... so far!

From Feb 21–Mar 3, I hosted a phenomenal game of tag with 10 of my friends from TexasTableTop.[1] This game had it all: deception, betrayal, ambushes, chase scenes—you know, classic tag shenanigans! I also had to walk 8.34 miles on Speedway because I lost the game. It's a great story. Let me tell you all about it.

I. Inspiration

Hoagie: "Synchronize your watches."
Callahan: "I don't know how to do that."
Randy: "I don't have a watch."
Sable: "Time is a construct."
—Tag (2018)

I was heavily inspired by Tag (2018): an action-comedy about five men who play tag every year for the month of May. Sure, it's certainly not the greatest movie of all time, but it's pretty entertaining: it's full of hijinks, absurd chase scenes, and relatively good one-liners. I was also inspired by some friends who played Assassins in their engineering org.

But to be honest: I am a massive fan of good-natured shenanigans. I wanted to make 10-day tag happen as soon as I had the idea. I needed to figure out a good set of rules though.

II. Crafting the Rules

NEW RULE: No throwing Crayola markers at people.
—Nathan Brown, player 001, in #rules

I wanted the rules of 10-day tag to ultimately be safe and non-disruptive, but also encourage people to play (and provide a strong incentive to not lose). There are a lot of small rules and technicalities outlined in the full rules, but here are the important rules:

Once the game ends, the player(s) tied for the most points must choose one of two options:

I think it's fun for games to have a "core element". In 10-day tag, the core element is Speedway—after all, it's the main campus road at UT.

I would later realize that the rules, while important, did not make the game awesome. It was the players who made it awesome. But I had to find players to participate in 10-day tag!

III: Persuasion & Beginning of the Game

If you wish to win a man over to your ideas, first make him your friend.
—Abraham Lincoln

Persuading people to play was much easier than I thought it'd be. I simply printed out 5 paper copies of the rules, and distributed them to friends during a TexasTableTop meeting. By the end of the meeting, I had 10 people who were interested, so I gathered them all together that night.

First, we all discussed and made some modifications to the rules. Then, I went on wheelofnames.com to randomly select the three taggers. Two of my friends, Sreekriti and Cooper, were chosen as taggers. But Boaz, a player who had already gone home for the weekend, was chosen as the final tagger. Since I didn't want Boaz to tank 200 points,[2] I designated myself as the final tagger. Then, I gave a different-colored marker to each tagger:

With that, the game had officially begun. I declared that in 5 minutes, taggers were allowed to tag players. This caused most of the players to run home as fast as they could. While everyone ran away, I assembled a discord server with six channels:

I didn't know it at the time, but 10-day tag would be so much fun. This post would be extremely long if I included a day-by-day recollection of events, so I'll just talk about the highlights:

IV: Highlights

Boaz isn’t allowed to break into a bathroom stall to tag me because that would be illegal, right?
—Cooper, player 003, in #general

Here are some of the best tags that occurred during the game:

These chases and close calls were so much fun. But the real question I know you're wondering about: who won 10-day tag?

V: Statistics

I just realized that we're not playing to win but instead playing to not lose.
—Pavan, player 006, in #general

I kept an extremely accurate log of everything that happened in 10-day tag. I spent ~2 hours distilling all of the data into a spreadsheet. Here's the summarized data:

I want to point out a few of the interesting stats:

There were 70 tags in the whole game, for an average of 7 tags/day. I'm pretty happy with that result! Next time, I'll probably write a Python script or something to do the statistics more easily.[5]

VI: Aftermath

Now we can finally be honest with each other about everything again.
—Julia, player 005, in #general, following the end of the game

I chose to walk 8.34 miles on Speedway as my punishment. I'm a nerd, but I'm not that much of a nerd. Taking the SAT would be monumentally boring and dramatically less cool.

I completed my punishment in approximately 2.5 hours: from 4:00-6:32pm on Sunday, March 9, 2025. I am grateful that the weather was beautiful, and I am even more grateful that 11 of my friends[6] joined me at some point on the walk:

I am extremely grateful that 10 of my friends were willing to embark on this fun, but admittedly also crazy, game of 10-day tag. They made the game what it was: they were competitive and willing to do what it takes to win, but they were also kind, honest, and displayed good sportsmanship throughout the entire game.

It's probable that all the players in 10-day tag got less schoolwork done during the game. But I hope that the memories made up for it.

I'll echo this advice for a long time: do more (good-natured) shenanigans. Especially if you're in college—but even if you're not, still do more shenanigans! It's easy to take life too seriously.

Now I'm back to school... again. UT spring break is just about over, and while I had an awesome road trip over spring break, I really need to lock in on my linear algebra and probability classes for the last weeks in the semester. Thanks for reading!

  1. UT Austin's board game club. ↩︎

  2. Because he wouldn't be able to tag anyone for two days. ↩︎

  3. Thanks to Sreekriti for the recommendation. ↩︎

  4. A new rule was added that night to disallow practically all physical contact from the game. ↩︎

  5. Thanks to Pavan for this suggestion. ↩︎

  6. Some in 10-day tag, some not. ↩︎