Around the time the Last Airbender was made into a movie, I was working at a tech camp with some fantastic people who insisted that we do an Avatar themed week. I didn’t know much about the show beforehand, so I decided to brush up on it with the help of some Netflix-and was instantly addicted. The whole staff chose characters to embody from the show, held mock-bending/sword fights, and generally had a ridiculously good time entertaining the kids.

It gets better.

One of the campers was a die-hard Avatar fan and decided his project would be to program a computer game version of Pai Sho, based on these rules(which have incidentally changed rather a lot in the past few years). Since the whole staff loved the idea, and because he wouldn’t have the time or ability to make all the graphics AND the program in a mere week, and since there were two graphic artists conveniently teaching… we were (pretty willingly) roped in to helping out.

Thus began a week-long endeavor to create a real Pai-Sho set(or at least a test one). We took what tiles we could from screenshots of the show(White Lotus, Lily, and a modified Wheel), and made up the rest. The very talented Christina Huther designed the flower tiles, I did the non-flowers, Christian helped the kid with the program, the game logic, and figured out the board(by which I mean printed it off in pieces and tried to figure out how it all fit together), and everyone else helped us put it together(by which I mean cut out all the tiles and put them on the back of the felt chair glides we didn’t need because the floors were carpeted). Yeah. It was legit.

I’ve only played a handful of times, mostly with my dear “Azula”, because A: The game goes on indefinitely until one person or the other admits defeat or possibly rots. B: The rules are constantly up for debate. C: There’s only so much passive-aggressive competition and tea-drinking two people can take and remain friends.

I keep meaning to redo the whole set and carve it into wood. Ah well, I’ll file it away with “someday I’ll open an Etsy wand shop,” and keep drawing for now.