Ending
After 3 hours, the 7 people who got access to their codes were able to work together and assemble them - beating my expectations by a long shot.
The event had begun at 16:03 BST, and the winners were;
- Blue - Boggy, claimed at 16:17 BST (4:17pm)
- Boggy was able to set my nickname on Skirmish to anything he wanted for at least a month..
He chose "Megidolaon Denier". They simply could not have existed. - Green - Bean, claimed at 16:35 BST (4:35pm)
- Bean was given the opportunity to post anything in the #private-property channel in Skirmish, a channel that I exclusively own. You can see their post in the server, I'm not describing it here. I don't think I even could.
- Red - Sprite, claimed at 19:06 BST (7:06pm)
- Sprite gained ownership of the #peehole-channel and is allowed to do whatever with it.
As of writing (7th April 2025), he has yet to do anything with his new kingdom.
Codes
Below are the 3 QR codes that had to be assembled.
Purple did not need to be assembled and was simply there to buffer the piece pool.
You can just click these, no need to scan them.
There were 4 pieces for Green, 6 for Blue, and 9 for Red.
Including purple, that's 20 pieces in total. Which doesn't divide cleanly into 7 equal amounts so one person only got 2 pieces instead of 3.
Cheating
I fully expected someone to try to cheat the game, which mostly didn't happen! Or, at least nothing major happened.
One player attempted to reassemble an incomplete code, which did not work as the generator I had used to produce the codes included minimal error correction. (it was the default ShareX QR generator)
The only protection against double dipping was a simple IP address check. Anyone with a VPN or a mobile network could have cheated if they realised this before the game ran out of pieces.
Which fortunately didn't happen as all of the pieces were claimed within 15 minutes of the announcement.
Development
Most of my April Fools jokes are done on the day, with the morning spent developing it and the afternoon releasing and fixing the countless oversights and bugs. This one I did in two days, starting on the 31st where most of the work was done and ending on the 1st with some minor tweaks and testing.
Maybe next year I'll take three days for an even more elaborate joke? Time will tell.
I also wrote a custom script to generate the slices, which you can get here in case that interests you.
Beware, I'm not a good programmer and I overcomment what I write.