Send Chill Pills to Black Rock City

We’re Anna Gollub and Daniel Estrada (AKA Hiplomat and No AKA The Pharmacists). We developed a radical gifting game called Chill Pills.

Chill Pills is a Radical Gifting Game

Chill Pills is easy to play even though it subverts every expectation you may have about what games are and how they work. To play, you simply gift beads to others to enable moments. It seems natural because bead exchange among humans is older than written language. With enough beads and a dash of humor and intention, the community can have meaningful, profound, hilarious and provoking connections that generate a one-of-kind, dynamic distributed record.

Some call it hippy Pokémon; others see it as chaos magic. We call it a “Moment Enabling Distributed System” (MEDS) because the bead name are puns on common psychiatric medications—though they work in very different ways. Chill Pills is an exercise in radical gifting and a small effort to counteract the stigma surrounding mental health.

Chill Pills has been a viral success at three regional burns, and we need your help to bring it to the Big Burn. In 2022 we attended Playa Del Fuego (PdF), Firefly, and POrtal, distributing a total of 12,000 beads in about 1,000 amber prescription vials. For Burning Man we’ve added a whole new line of beads and hope to distribute up to 36,000 beads in 2,000 prescription bottles. That’s over 100 pounds of beads! If the beads were laid end to end they would be over half a kilometer long, and stacked they would be taller than the Empire State Building. It’s a lot of beads!

Every $2 donated enables us to fill one prescription containing about 12 beads, the labeled bottle, and the menu insert. 2000 bottles means we're hoping to raise $4000 to send Chill Pills to Black Rock City! Our sincere thanks to all Enablers for your support and encouragement.

Every bead a moment.