Due Back Friday

It's October 1997 and the owner has taped a notice to the window: the shop closes on Friday 19 December. You're the clerk. Every Saturday you open the drop box and find out what came back overnight: a weepie with a cinema stub in it, six karate tapes from the same kid, somebody's home video labelled in someone else's handwriting. Then someone comes in, and they're three weeks late. You decide what to do about the fee. Let it slide and they'll keep coming back, but the till gets thinner. Charge it and you might lose them. Or shut early and take the week for yourself, and the owner gets a bit closer to giving up. Every week you also put one tape in somebody's hands and write down why. Three tracks keep count: Regulars, the Till and the Last Reel. On Closing Night they decide whether the shop is Saved, Sold, Closed With Honours, or whether you've already walked away. We ran the rules 5,000 times before laying out a page: about one season in five ends Saved, and the shop closes before the tenth week in about one in sixteen. Underneath it all is one overdue slip from before you started. You find out what happened to that tape on the last night. In the book (27 pages, six illustrations): - Rules, a one-page reference and a week played out as an example - Six name-tags, six staff-pick shelves and six secrets - Two d66 Return Slot tables (72 returns and visitors), the week die and the tape table - A clerk's card, and ten week pages that get darker as the season runs out - Six truths about the missing tape, four endings, and rental cards and shelf labels to cut out You need two six-sided dice and a pen. A week takes about half an hour.