Splaffing. Yes.

Most easy to use random number systems are limited. Coins can only give heads or tails, dice can only give numbers 1-6. Furthermore, they are completely objective. And anybody who has played a game involving dice knows that this is a major flaw. Not being able to argue whether there are 5 pips or 6 showing is frustrating.

So I set out to create a random number system that was highly versatile and subjective. I based it on quantum computers and glue. It's called splaffing.

The basic idea of splaffing is to take a wad of material that had a chance of sticking to a surface (eg. disintegrated wet tissue paper). This material is called the SPLAFF. You then take the splaff and throw it at a flat vertical surface, and record what percentage of the splaff stuck to the surface.

The glue inspiration was the nihilistic intents of my schoolmates - while the teacher was not looking, they would throw up pencils with a globule of stick-glue on the end. The pencils would stick to the ceiling, and they would acquire a look on their face (akin to constipation) as they tried very hard not to laugh. Oh, what wit!

The quantum bit comes in with the idea of percentages. Splaffing produces percentage rather than integer results! Thus the product can be used in both conventional board games (by having a fixed constant such as the number 10, and taking the percentage of that constant) as well as other pursuits (like prophesying the chances your local sports club will win their next match, or figuring out how to divide your time on Sundays, or playing double quantum werewolf.)

The nice thing about splaffs is their utter disregard for fairness. The material the splaff is made out of, the surface at which it is being thrown, the amount of splaff used, the velocity of the throw, the conditions surrounding the throw; these are all variables which help make splaffing more prejudiced. Because if people were happy with the fairness of dice, this task wouldn't exist. The number of variables also encourage productive cheating, such as changing the consistency of the splaff on your turn, or grabbing an opponents arm as they throw the splaff.

I demonstrated this fact when playing games of 1000% with my sister (the aim being, of course, to get 1000% in score). This game would have been incredibly boring using dice, cards, or any other random number generator, but splaffing made it great! There were secret splaff recipes, splaff contamination ploys, splaff slinging (the bathroom suffered a lot of splaff damage), and all together we had a splaffing time. Also, splaff is just so fun to say.

I hope more and more people splaff in their games! It certainly is the most fun I've had just generating a number.