What is the history of Ten? How did you create this game?
1. At the beginning
Ten originated [or the ideas that is] on Sep 15, 2003, when I got a stash of over 2000 pennies to count and add to my collection of more than 4400 at the time. Counting all of these would take a very long time and is very boring. I needed to find a way to make it more fun to count all those pennies. Indeed, it was about 3 days later on Sep 18, 2003 in which I started to find a way. Ten is an easy number to judge on using my hypercount ability*. Organization was also something that was needed. This alone wasn't enough. Because I like randomness, the act of dealing out the limit range of 8 to 20 took place with the time limit of 4 seconds. This explains the main reasons for the randomness and time limit. The time limit came about as, if it didn't exist, you could easily count a ten out and score huge every time [Given only 1000 pennies, you're looking at a score of 50,500 assuming that no rows were ever created [In a normal game, you'd need over 20,000 coins average just to get this kind of score, perhaps more than 20,000 to something like 35,000.].]. This is where the timer comes in.
2. Setting the minimum amount for hand
Upon doing the actual counting [after sorting through the dates and separating old pennies 1965 and older from the junk ones [1966 and newer], I varied the rules quite a bit. At first, the minimum was 5, but this made the game too easy after a while, especially when you have a non-five row involved [If you don't remember or haven't seen it yet, a non-five row is any row with 6, 7, 8, or 9 coins caused from getting 16, 17, 18, or 19 in your hand. These can be devistating if you get too many of them.]. To make the game harder, I increased this to 7 then 8. Because I liked to "dig" things [It's like that of Solitaire when you get a column with no card displayed, you "dig" into it by flipping that card, and once that one is moved and becomes empty again, you "dig" further.], the concept of removing the rows came about, also known as the reserve. Because the number ten was involved in so many ways, I figured I'll keep it to adding more ways by limiting the number a row can have to ten. If it gets ten, the row is removed [or "dug" into] and placed in the stock, which was where I placed all my pennies when they were being counted. This ten-high, ten-wide, ten-long thing was to seriously help with organization when I completely forgot how many pennies I had and had over 4400 of them to count [which took 7 hours to do]. Though I've used stacks of 5's previously, it didn't work out as well, and was significantly slower due to one of my abilities I call "hypercount". It allows me to count small quantities of something about 20 times faster than what most would be able to do. Read the footnote for more information on the hypercount ability
Because I plan to get 20,000 pennies by the end of 2004, that means nearly 1000 pennies a month as I have 16000 right now and still counting as of May 01, 2004. This means that I'll be playing the game "ten" quite often**.
Most of Ten's terms are explained in the main rules.
Footnotes:
* The hypercount ability allows me to quickly count small quantities of something about 20 times faster than what someone else normally would. It's based on a doubling dependency. That is, if I add just one more item, it takes 2 times longer to count it. It works best at 8 objects as I take about 3/4 of a second to count that [half a second base as it doesn't include the reaction time]. For 10 objects, I take usually about 2.5 seconds to count it, still faster than most would be able to.
** Instead of playing the game, Ten, I've recently [Feb 8, 2004] found a way that's nearly six times faster than playing the game Ten and about 3/4 as fun. I counted 1400 pennies in about 35 minutes where it'd normally take about three hours.
