Download the one-page 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 — 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, tell me first, i need a minute, coming back — the stepping stone that would let you land gently instead of being pulled across. 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, a minute alone, 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.
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.
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.
If it's not working, it's not the person.
Not a screening tool. A spread is the person telling you something — not you assessing them. No pathology paradigm, no deficit ideology, no behaviorism: a card names a need, never a symptom or a target.
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.