Society Notice Fix

An assistant writes the society notice, and you have ninety seconds to catch what it got wrong and send it out.

Who this is for

Sameer Bhosale is 24 and works at a mobile accessories shop in Nashik Road. He lives in Sai Krupa, sixty-two flats, where his father is the secretary and Sameer is the one who actually types the notices into the society group. He plays this on the 7.40 bus home, one hand on the pole, four rounds between the depot and his stop.

How the job is done today

Right now his father writes the notice in a long-lined diary at the dining table. Water tanker on Sunday, no motor from nine to one, keep buckets filled. Sameer types it out on his phone, half English and half Marathi, and sends it to the group of ninety-one members. Twenty people reply noted. Two ask what time again. One says the last tanker was a waste of money and the thread runs to forty messages. Next morning a printed copy goes up near the lift with cello tape, and by evening it has a chai stain on it.

The screens, in order

1. The Situation — One card tells you what has happened in the building and who the notice has to reach, before the clock starts.
2. The Draft — The assistant's first version is already sitting there with the ninety seconds running, and you cut and fix it by tapping.
3. Send — One button puts your notice up, in whatever state it is in when you press it.
4. The Board — You watch the sixty-two residents read what you sent and reply, which is where the round is won or lost.
5. Streak — Shows how that notice scored and offers the next situation before you have time to put the phone away.

What it keeps track of

• Situations — what happened, which building, who must be told, the tone it needs, the one fact that has to survive
• Seeded faults — what the assistant got wrong this time, where in the notice it sits, how bad it is if it goes out
• Residents — name, flat number, what annoys them, what they say to a good notice, what they say to a bad one
• Rounds played — which situation, what got sent, seconds left on the clock, how the building took it
• Streak — how many clean notices in a row, best run so far, which situation broke it

The one decision that matters

Does the assistant's first version arrive good, or slightly wrong. If it arrives good, the player reads it, presses send, and there is no game, only a button. It should arrive confidently wrong in one or two places, and never the same place twice. The date says Sunday when the situation said Saturday. It opens with three lines of respected members before mentioning that the water is going off. The ninety seconds go into finding the fault, not into writing prose, and that is the whole pleasure, being the one who catches it. Keep the fault visible without scrolling on a small phone.

What to leave out of the first version

Leave out the friend leaderboard and the option for players to write their own situations. Ship forty situations written by hand, each with its fault placed on purpose. Whether this is fun depends entirely on the drafts being wrong in a way that makes someone laugh and reach for the edit, and you cannot learn that from situations sent in by strangers. The leaderboard can come once people are reaching a sixth round on their own.

How you would know it worked

Someone copies a notice they wrote inside the game, pastes it into their real society group, and it goes up near the lift the next morning. That means the drafts sounded like actual society language and the fixing felt like real work done well.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I want to make a small game about writing society notices, because I write them for my building anyway. Each round shows me one situation, like the water tanker coming on Sunday or the Ganpati collection, and then an assistant writes the notice for me straight away, except something in it is wrong, maybe the wrong day, or it is too rude, or it takes five lines to reach the point. I get ninety seconds to fix it on my phone and send it. Then I want to watch the residents of the building read it and reply, some annoyed, some just saying noted, and I get a score and move to the next one. Keep about forty situations ready and make sure the whole thing works on a slow phone in a moving bus.