I hosted Season 2 of 10-day tag

We are so back.

• 14 Nov 2025 ·
• College,
• Games,
• Shenanigans

From Oct 27–Nov 6, I hosted a spectacular game of tag with 13 of my friends. I hosted Season 1 of 10-day tag back in Feb/Mar 2025, and had so much fun I had to run it again in my third semester at UT. Here's the recap:

I. recruiting unwitting suspects

I started delivering letters of invitation to people on Oct 18. Most people did not know what the letter was for, which added to the intrigue.

I hand-delivered 13 or 14 letters and received a response from 12 friends saying they wanted to play 10-day tag. I was pretty happy about that RSVP rate^[1], and had a good number of people playing. I told them all to meet at Littlefield Fountain at 9:30pm on Oct 27 for the start of the game, and everyone came!

II. improving the rules

Season 1's rules were pretty good, but still needed some improvement for Season 2. I made 3 main changes for Season 2's rules:

1. If you're a tagger, once you tag someone else, you cannot be tagged by any player for 10 minutes.^[2]
2. Daily "fountain selfies" must be taken in an area surrounding Littlefield Fountain from 2-7pm, instead of being taken anywhere on Speedway from 3-9pm.^[3]
3. Everyone was required to share their class schedules publicly.^[4]

Here are the other core rules:

• There are 3 taggers, who each have a Crayola marker.
• If you touch a non-tagger with your marker, they become a tagger and receive the marker.
• Players are safe and cannot be tagged:
  • in their place of residence
  • in class (more clarification in full rules)
  • in the Littlefield Fountain photo zone
• At 10pm each night, the point leaderboard will be publicly updated to reflect:
  • Every player who is a tagger gets +100 points.
  • Every player who failed to post their daily fountain selfie gets +50 points.
  • Every player who hasn't yet shared their class schedule gets +25 points.
• At the end of the game, the player(s) with the most points must walk/jog/run the full length of Speedway^[5] 25 consecutive times.

I explained the rules to everyone at Littlefield Fountain, and everyone seemed good with them. In retrospect, they were pretty good rules, because I only had to provide four clarifications over the course of the game.

III. chasing people around

At 9:55pm on Oct 27, I randomly assigned the purple, green, and orange markers to 3 players, and we were off to the races. This article would be too long if I chronicled everything that happened in 10-day tag. So here are some highlights:

• Only four minutes after the game began, Jackson tagged Caden in a West Campus chase. Caden was trying to make it back to his apartment to be safe for the night, but was tagged only 500 feet from his parking garage.
• Camille called me to ask for a rules clarification, and I foolishly told her I had to be quiet, as I was in the library. She then combed through a large portion of the 3rd floor of the PCL and caught me off guard, so I didn't have time to run.
• Lance and Isaiah were engaged in a back-and-forth battle while both attending an org meeting, where there were a total of four tags between 9:40pm and 11:00pm, despite the 10 minute cooldown mechanic.
• I met Hudson at the fountain, where he was safe. He left the Littlefield Fountain photo zone and let me tag him at 4:37pm, which I was pleased (and confused) about, until he told me that he planned to follow me to my required quiz in RLP. My quiz started at 5pm, so I only had immunity in RLP at 4:50pm—three minutes after my immunity would expire. Thus, I booked it to RLP, trying to lose Hudson, only to realize that he was waiting for me outside the building. I tried to enter via a side entrance and trick him, but he anticipated my move and almost chased me down. I only escaped because he was wearing boots.
• I ran into Camille while walking to one of my classes on Speedway. She was handing out copies of the Travesty. She saw me, said "travesty...? oh no" and tried to run away, to no avail. I wasn't even plotting to tag her—it was truly a serendipitous encounter.
• Nick was fountain camping and happened to be stationed in the perfect spot to chase me down and tag me before I realized. Thankfully, I was able to tag Lance just 20 minutes later at Medici.
• Caden was walking home from fountain camping, where he completely randomly saw me on the intersection of 21st and Guad. There was a 20s chase or so, but I wasn't able to sustain enough speed to outrun him.
• I ran all the way from the fountain, where I was waiting to ambush Aniketh, up to the area near the In-N-Out just to tag Aniketh and rid myself of the marker at 9pm on the last day, 1 hour before the game ended.
• Eight minutes before the game ended, Lance, even though he had no risk of losing, managed to tag Hannah at a dance. This was a crazy ending.

Let me tell you. 10-day tag is a lot of fun.

IV. doing cool statistics

I did a lot of Python over the summer at my internship. For Season 1 of 10-day tag, I manually calculated most of the statistics with Google Sheets like a peasant. So this time around, I wrote a bunch of scripts in Python to generate some cool graphs. It took me way too long, but oh well. I mean, I made a whole git repo!

But the graphs are so cool. Look at this one:

This shows the point progression of Player 3 (H. Claire) throughout the days. She was doing so well, until the last 2 days...

Here's a spreadsheet with some good data:

Some overall statistics:

• 80 tags in 10 days = 1 tag every 3 hours, on average
• 111/130 (85.3%) fountain selfies posted
• 4000 total points with 13 players = ~308 points/player, on average

V. administering loser's punishment

Player 3, H. Claire, lost and thus walked 25 lengths of Speedway on Sunday, November 8. I was there mostly the whole time, to make sure she didn't CHEAT!!!^[6] But the weather was nice, and myself, H. Simon, and W. Wozny, as well as Julia^[7] joined her for much of the walk.

[maybe add pictures]

VI. making conclusive remarks

Overall, I would categorize Season 2 of 10-day tag as a large, roaring success. I think everyone had a lot of fun, and I'm glad that I can use my strengths (of organizing things well) to inject fun and whimsy into the college experiences of my friends.

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