OG MAG
VOL. 01: LUCK

when we see a game of skill, we ban it.

everything in this magazine is pure luck. nothing you read here will make you better at any of these games. that is the point. there is no strategy section. there is no meta. there is no coaching. practice does nothing. aim does nothing. your gaming chair does nothing.

every friday at 8pm est the church opens and the games begin. some of you get raptured. most of you die. we do not decide which. neither do you.

by reading this magazine you affirm that your fate is not our liability, that falling 50 meters through a glass pew is a religious experience, and that you agreed to this provision the moment your eyes hit this paragraph.

there. our ass is covered.

see you friday.

every friday, 8pm est, on the otherside. ape church and other games run a service where the only liturgy is probability. no skill-based games are permitted inside the building. this is enforced.

why luck? because skill has a leaderboard and a leaderboard has the same four names on it forever. luck has no memory. luck does not care about your k/d, your win streak, your 4000 hours. the best player in the room and the guy who walked in by accident have identical odds. this is the fairest format ever invented and it makes people furious.

winners do not "win". winners are raptured: lifted out of the game in a beam of light while everyone else falls through the floor. we find this healthy.

tile drop is snakes & ladders' violent cousin. you stand on a tile. tiles vanish. you did not pick a better tile than anyone else, because there is no better tile. there is only the tile that stays and the tiles that do not.

in normal battleship you call coordinates and sink little plastic boats. in ours, you stand on the grid. you are the boat. somebody calls your square and you go through the floor. admiral and ammunition at the same time.

F2. nothing personal.

five recorded raptures. five different souls. snakes & ladders is the winningest game in church history and nobody has won it twice. this is the purest data we have that luck has no memory. a dynasty where the throne changes every friday and the crown means nothing next week.

the board does all the work. you roll. the snake eats you or it doesn't. a ladder appears or it doesn't. the ancient egyptians invented this game to teach children about fate. we use it the same way, except the children are grown men with ape pfps and the lesson costs them everything.

a 50 meter tall maze with 24 golden switches. here is the mechanic that broke people: your switch does nothing for you. every switch opens a gate on the far side of the maze, for a stranger you cannot see and will never meet.

the only way anyone reaches the core is if people who owe each other nothing keep flipping switches anyway. altruism is not a virtue in here. it is the only functioning game mechanic. the maze is provably solvable. we ran the proof before we let anyone inside. whether it is solvable by people was friday's experiment.

one hundred fifty glass pews on a deck in the sky. under every pew: 50 meters of nothing, a sealed dark box, and a coffin. the light picks a roller. the roll picks a number. the number's glass opens. repeat until one soul remains.

you do not aim. you do not run. you sit in church and you find out.

four towers. two green, two red. you pick one and it starts rising, each at its own speed. nobody tells you the speeds. first to the top gets a button, and the button deletes one of the other towers. randomly. you cannot aim it.

so the fastest climber gets the honor of maybe deleting their own friends, and the last tower standing still has to roll a dice to find out if winning even counted. it is the stock market with the honesty turned all the way up.