Download the print sheet (PDF) — the same content, laid out for handing round.
A deck for naming sensory and niche-construction needs. Point at a card, or lay a few. No reading needed to play.
Two rules hold the whole thing up.
- No scoring. No points, no matching, no right answer, no winning. There is no wrong card and no wrong hand.
- The person controls sharing. Turning a card up is the person sharing it; the turn is the consent. You don't turn their cards over for them.
Seven ways to play
Pick the one card that's you right now. That's the whole game. Say back what you see: "Buzzy today. Okay." Under a minute.
Lay a place, a weather, and a couple of what-helps cards. A sentence in pictures — the cave, buzzy, headphones. You've been handed a design brief. Build the conditions. Two to five minutes.
Everyone lays a weather card face-up. The room's weather becomes visible. No one is named. Nothing is scored. Two minutes, and the group has a shared word for the day.
Every day has edges — the jumps between one thing and the next, where a mind in deep focus gets yanked to something new. Those crossings are where the day gets hard, and the strain is the jump, not the person. Lay the day out left to right, then find its edges: focus → talking, rest → joining in, home → out the door. On each edge that bites, lay a lily pad — slowly, not yet, i need a minute, coming back — the stepping stone that would let you land gently instead of being pulled across. A what-helps card can pad a crossing too: tell me first is the one that most often does. You're not mapping what's wrong with you; you're padding the crossings so the day fits. Designed with the person, never at them. Ten to fifteen minutes.
Deal a table of what-helps cards with needs that conflict — room to move against less talking, just one person against a full group. Build one habitat that holds them all. You'll feel neurological pluralism instead of hearing about it. Twenty minutes.
Lay places, interaction moods, and lily pads left to right — the cave, ready now, the campfire, i need a minute, back again. A rhythm of alone and together, mapped in cards. Move one when the rhythm shifts. This is intermittent collaboration: nobody stays in one place all day.
Lay the what-helps that would make a space fit you — a den, less to look at, the right temperature — with the habitat card at the center. A design brief for the room, not a snapshot of a day. Then build it, on any budget — Zone a room works out which zones the space can already hold, and prints signs for the door.
Sharing belongs to the person
The turn of a card is the consent. It plays out three ways:
- Kept — the spread stays face-down. Nothing is read until the person turns something up.
- Shown by invitation — the person hands the spread to one person they pick. A deliberate act, not standing permission.
- Ambient only — in group play, only the room's weather shows. No individual's cards, ever.
Interaction cards are the exception — they're made to be shown.
In the web deck that choice is two buttons. Copy for a journal is the whole spread — the date, the questions, the note box — and it belongs to the person. Copy to share is the cards alone. Ask for the shared one by name: it leaves out the note, the date, and the interaction, kind words and grower cards, which are worn or kept rather than sent.
When a person lays "stuck"
Stuck is a lily pad. It's a place to land, not a failure. Read it as information: something in the environment isn't fitting yet. Don't push the person across. Ask what would help them land — or offer a what-helps card and let them choose.
How to respond, in three moves
- Mirror it back. Name what you see, plainly. No praise, no fixing, no interrogation.
- Reach for the environment, not the person. A card is a request to change the conditions. Change them.
- Leave the sharing with the person. What they turn up is theirs to turn up.
A pile of spreads after an event
Nobody can hold twenty spreads in their head. Group access needs turns a pile into one short brief for the room, written so you can hand that page to whatever AI you already use and have it do the sorting — under rules that keep the room as the subject and never count anybody. Merge and strip first; the page says what to take out, and why.
If it's not working, it's not the person.
Not an AAC board. It sits alongside a person's real communication system and never replaces it; a spread cannot carry somebody's words. Why that matters.
Not a screening tool. A spread is the person telling you something — not you assessing them. No pathology paradigm, no deficit ideology, no behaviorism, no emotional sorting: a card names a need, never a symptom, a target, or a level.
Broken systems, not broken people. The deck exists so a person can shape the space around them — and so the people beside them can read what they need without asking a person to explain in words they may not have.