How it works

Three settings decide the grid: the earliest season in your run, the latest, and how forgiving you are feeling. Press anything and twenty-four squares are dealt from a hand-written table, arranged around a free centre, and the address bar quietly updates to match. That address is the card. There is no save button because there is nothing to save — the run, the mood, the name you gave it and every square you have dabbed are all carried in the link itself, so the way to keep a card is to copy the address, and the way to hand somebody the identical grid is to send it to them.

The deal is not a shuffle. The same three settings and the same name produce the same twenty-four squares tomorrow, on a different phone, in a different country. That is the whole reason the link is worth sending: whoever opens it is not getting a fresh roll of their own, they are getting your grid, square for square, and can play it against you.

What the forgiveness setting actually changes

Every square in the table carries a private number for how often the beat turns up. Forgiving weights the deal towards the squares that happen constantly, so a line usually lands inside an episode or two and the game is over by the second ad break. Unforgiving weights it the other way, towards the rarer beats, and produces cards that can survive a whole afternoon without a single line — which is the version to pick if you are watching six episodes and want the grid to still be alive at the end of them. Even-handed ignores the number entirely and deals flat. Underneath the grid the card prints its own expected pace, so you can see what you have just given yourself before anybody starts.

Why the squares are weighted to a stretch of seasons

The run is cut into three stretches of five, which is arithmetic rather than an opinion about where the show changes. Most squares are tagged as belonging to all three, because most of what this series does, it did from the beginning and never stopped. A minority are tagged to one stretch or two: the research beats that belong to the years before anybody had a permanent address, the furniture that only exists once the characters have somewhere to keep it. Choose a narrow run and those become far likelier; choose everything and they thin out again.

Those tags are one person's judgement, made by hand, and the page would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Nothing here consulted an episode index, nothing counted anything, and no square is sourced to a particular hour of television. If you think a square sits in the wrong stretch you are probably right, and it costs you nothing to ignore it — a bingo card is a joke about a show's habits, not a citation.

Playing it with a room

Deal one card, name it after the evening, and send the link round before the first episode starts. Everybody is then looking at the same grid in the same order, which is the only way the shouting works: two people with different cards are playing two different games and neither of them can be wrong. Dabs are per person, so each of you can mark your own copy and compare at the end without anybody's grid changing underneath them. Lines count in the ordinary way — five across, five down, or either diagonal, with the centre free — and the card keeps its own tally of how many you have and how many squares are still blank.

What is on the card, and what never will be

Squares describe what happens, in sentences written here. None of them quotes anybody: no line of dialogue, no catchphrase, no lyric, no song title and no episode title appears on this page or ever will, and squares that arrive later from the site's writing assistant are dropped outright if they contain a quotation mark at all. Nor is this a drinking game, and it is not going to become one — the version of this that comes with instructions to drink is well known and this site is open to anybody who finds it, with no age check anywhere on it. The pleasure is the same either way. It is the catalogue of a show's own repetitions, and it works perfectly well with a cup of tea.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan tool inspired by the television series Supernatural. It is a free, unofficial fan tool — an unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Warner Bros. Television, The CW, or any official rights holder of Supernatural.

Every square, label and line of commentary on this page was written for it. No dialogue, script text, lyric, title or artwork from any television series is reproduced anywhere in it. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of Supernatural. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

Where the rest of them are

If you would rather be asked a question than handed a grid, the quizzes next door do the asking. The Supernatural section lists every quiz and tool in this wing, and the fan tributes hub has the rest of the corner. If you would rather play something than fiddle with a tool, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.