A six-step cedar-room checklist for keeping play light.

01. The cedar-room mindful-play checklist

This is the six-step list we keep at the bench. It is meant to be read in under a minute. If you find yourself reading the longer guides further down the page in a hurry, that itself is a signal worth attending to.

1. Decide before you open the tab how many minutes you intend to give the cedar room. If the answer is more than thirty, that is your first signal to pause.
2. Use the on-screen point pool as a hard ceiling. If you empty it twice in one sitting, close the tab rather than press RESET a third time.
3. If the round is replacing something you would rather not face this evening, name the something out loud. Naming usually helps.
4. Keep a phone number from the list below within reach. None of the four of us are clinicians, so we will not write the conversation for you — the orgs below will.
5. If the cedar room is creeping into work hours or sleep schedule, the issue has stopped being entertainment. Take that signal seriously.
6. Talk to one person you trust within forty-eight hours of noticing any of the above. The first conversation is always the hard one.

02. Canadian-leaning help organisations

The orgs below are independent of CedarEdge and offer free, confidential conversations in Canadian English. None of them are funded by us.

• Gambling Guidelines Canada — Canadian responsible-play guidelines across lottery and online entertainment. gamblingguidelines.ca
• Responsible Gambling Council — Canadian non-profit dedicated to preventing problem play through research and standards. responsiblegambling.org
• Gamblers Anonymous — International fellowship of adults supporting each other. gamblersanonymous.org

03. Why a free-play page bothers with all this

Nobody loses real money on the cedar-room page; there is no payment processor anywhere on the site. But the patterns of attention the cedar room engages are the same patterns at work in a venue an adult might visit on the weekend. Three of us on the bench have either themselves, or someone close to them, watched a small Thursday-evening object stop being small. The checklist above is the one we use for ourselves.

04. A note for visitors helping someone else

If you are reading this page on behalf of a family member or friend whose play has stopped being light, the same Canadian-leaning orgs above run separate lines for the people around an adult in trouble. Each org publishes free, plain-language guides for the conversation; none of them require an account, a referral, or a payment.

05. What this page does not pretend to be

It is not clinical advice. It is not a diagnostic tool. It is the working notes of a four-person Vancouver workshop that wanted its visitors to have somewhere to look if the cedar room ever stopped being a small thing. The orgs above are the actual clinical resources.