I spent much of my formative years being bored and waiting for it to be time to go home. To go home so I could rest, read books, and pass the time easily, where I would be significantly less bored. I had no visit-enabled friends to speak of, so I was hardly going to another person's house to socialize or ever really have any fun. This will not count the place of peripheral friends of brothers with the Playstation room. As my parents have - for basically all of my conscious life - been divorced, having an actual friend whose house I actually went to frequently to carry the remaining weight would have really helped. Or if I actually recognized the social potential of the owners of the Playstation room. In fact I usually ended up being locked into long-hour waits at buildings lived in by some friend of an immediate family relative. Nobody can tell me I'd have had better spent time if we "just got a babysitter". Believe me, mum looked.
The worst ordeals by far were the times when I had to deal with some temporary but prolonged exposure to unwanted waiting hours because of my dad. Often I'd be driven away to some rural dustbowl with nothing of interest for kilometers around, where I'd stay for hours in whatever car or ute we arrived in and the only thing I could do to pass the time then was play terrible games on a pre-2007 cellphone. No Internet, no Nintendo DS, no money, and for most of the time not even dad. Just me and the most difficulty-twisted primitive phone games with wonkiest 4-bit controls or whatever ever.
If I was at a house instead of some insufferable motorcycle dirt track, often there was a good chance that I could play by myself with access to board games. Whether they were meant to be single-player before I make stuff up or not. That also sucked, and I don't want to go through that again, but there was one "board game" in memory that stayed with me.
Pass the Pigs was a weird game that I looked at for a while, even though I probably knew that in spite of being me, in my shocking situation, I wouldn't dream of playing it no matter if I had a second person to share it with or not. It was a small green box with what I imagine to be a minimal set of contents. It seemed like a pretty miserable thing, where the goal was to toss two tiny plastic pig figurines at the same time and then practically gain points each turn depending on what positions pure luck decided the pigs landed in. Positions being connected to - though possibly not exclusively so, given the old status of my memory - how the plastic pigs landed on each other.
Actually at the time of revision before final publication I suddenly realize that this could be wrong. Maybe that's a really rare position in that drawing, or they're just meant to land on two individual places on the ground. I suddenly discovered in myself that it was probably about what side of their own bodies two separate pigs landed on, like if one landed with its tail down or something. That being said, though I don't remember much of the rules, and I could be remembering something wrong, I still have a fuzzy picture of how the game "worked" in 2025. To this day I have never played it, or the cheap equivalent that apparently exists where you just throw normal dice.
But one rule I saw on the leaf from inside the box stood out, and this rule played its cards so that I would never forget it.
This wasn't just any ordinary rule. It wasn't a rule that you just "follow". It wasn't even a rule that happens. It seemed like more of a philosophical entertainment than something that your ordinary rule-maker would logically decide to take the extra 13 minutes to add, or the extra ink to print. Have a look at this picture and see if you think it happening during standard Pass the Pigs gameplay is likely.
If you would respond to that with "the pigs are never going to land like that when you throw them", then to the best of my long-term memory, you're on to something.
The game rules themselves don't just say that this is impossible. They also provide a ruling for what happens in your game if the pigs land this way, even though they clearly just stated a few seconds ago that it's impossible. It's a directive that you should do something - if you meet a condition that never happens. If we believe everything that the rules say, then they have a rule that can never come into effect. But if it somehow did come into effect, and your physics duped, the rule is as follows:
That's basically how I remember it.
There's something unsettling about this idea. That you do something impossible and then the game tells you that it wants you to stop playing it. They could have just said that this is impossible and told you not to worry about it. Because you don't need to worry about something when you know it objectively won't happen, right?
But they do worry about it. They took the time and the cost of a small amount per unit sold in ink to put that information on the rule sheet for some reason that honestly I still don't know. And I tried to do this entire post from memory without doing any web searches for Pass the Pigs other than to find out whether its title's "the" should be capitalized or not, which considering my plan to go into this without interference went slightly badly.
Maybe Pass the Pigs publishers of all people were trying to save people from wasting their time and effort, like they're not already bored and should bother to try to get this landing combination. Though the rule does appear to accidentally bring something interesting out of the experience. This odd feeling of unsettling logic about the game and the world that houses it ending.
I believe that since finding this game, I might think about this concept more than once every two years. The Pass the Pigs rule that The Game Ends that comes into effect if you do something that you can't do.
I find it less haunting than some things, and more haunting than a lot of them. I find it more haunting than the 64 ring Tower of Hanoi game where having 64 discs in play mathematically adds up to so many translations that following the rules it would supposedly take more time than there is time left in our universe to complete. I used to boggle my own mind often by trying to imagine the ways of our reality having no universe at all, that is, if there was no reality. No reality being something really creepy to think about when you fully resonate your thought with the concept. I have a brother who apparently used to ponder and experience the same philosophical no-universe thing. But this would be the first time in memory that I ever got creeped out about something like this by a fucking board game...
Speaking of universes, would you have to screw with reality just to make this play in Pass the Pigs happen? Would it be worth it in order to proactively get yourself out of this weak point-keeping game before turn 2? Is the rule sheet even right when it says that this is impossible? What would it actually mean if you got the pigs to do the impossible stack? Does it even make sense to ask that question? Are any questions about this right?
One thing I do know, from the value of thought experiments, is what priorities you should have after doing something that required the laws of reality breaking to occur. Obviously if you did you should give something else your attention. You really shouldn't keep playing Pass the Pigs in pursuit of game score in that scenario. If you land two pigs in that position, and it's because the fundamental rules of reality broke down, you've got bigger problems.