About Owlglass

Small games that hold up a mirror.

The name

Till Eulenspiegel is a prankster in old German tales. In German, Eule means owl and Spiegel means mirror. In English he became Owlglass: an owl and a glass, the old word for a mirror.

The oldest complete book of his pranks that survives was printed in Strasbourg in 1515. The picture on its first page shows him on horseback, holding an owl and a mirror.

Two of his pranks

The invisible painting. The Landgrave of Hesse, a German prince, hires him to paint the great hall. He leaves the walls bare, then announces that anyone born outside marriage can't see the painting. The prince and his court stand in front of the blank wall and admire it rather than admit they see nothing.

The donkey that could read. He tells the scholars of Erfurt he can teach a donkey to read. He puts oats between the pages of an old book, and the donkey learns to turn the pages looking for food. On the day of the test there are no oats, and the donkey brays "I-A!", which is how a donkey brays in German. "There," he tells the scholars, "it already knows two vowels, I and A."

That is the idea behind this site: games where people see themselves, and laugh.

The games

• The Perfect Autocrat: rule a nation with the real habits of history's vainest rulers.
• Are You a Saint, a Tyrant or a Gladiator?: ten situations, and the real people who faced them.
• Write an Instant Bestseller: the parts every bestseller is made of, and what happens after you publish.

The rules we play by

• Every fact is real. The jokes come from true history and real patterns, and every fact has been checked against a source. If you find a mistake, tell us and we'll fix it.
• We mock vanity, not victims. The rulers in The Perfect Autocrat are laughed at for their vanity. Their victims are never the joke.
• Nothing to sign up for. No accounts, no email list. Your progress stays in your own browser.