MASH game online

Tap Draw the spiral, then Stop. The rings of the spiral are your magic number. The game counts through your lists and crosses out an option each time the count lands, as on paper, until each list has one option left. Read your future as one sentence, and send the link to a friend.

MASH is a paper game that kids play to tell each other's future. The letters stand for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, and House: the four homes you could end up in. Under them go lists of other things, such as who you end up with, how many kids you have, your job, your car, your city, and your pet. Nobody owns the game. It spread from school to school, and players change the lists all the time.

1. Write MASH at the top of the page. Under it, write your lists, four options each. Put good ones and one or two bad ones in every list.
2. Get the magic number. A friend draws a spiral from the middle out until you say stop. Count the rings: that is the number.
3. Start at the M and count each option in order: the four homes, then each list from top to bottom.
4. When the count reaches the magic number, cross out that option. Start the next count at 1 on the next option.
5. Skip every option that is crossed out. When a list has one option left, circle it, and skip that list from then on.
6. After the last option, go on from the M. Stop when every list has one circled option. Read them out: that is your future.

This page plays by exactly these rules. Written rules differ on small points, such as whether a circled option still counts. This page skips it, as the written rules we checked say.

Take a small board with three categories: Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House; then parrot, corgi, cat, goldfish; then Lisbon, Tokyo, Paris, Seoul. The magic number is 5. Each line below is one count.

1. Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House, parrot: cross out parrot.
2. corgi, cat, goldfish, Lisbon, Tokyo: cross out Tokyo.
3. Paris, Seoul, Mansion, Apartment, Shack: cross out Shack.
4. House, corgi, cat, goldfish, Lisbon: cross out Lisbon.
5. Paris, Seoul, Mansion, Apartment, House: cross out House.
6. corgi, cat, goldfish, Paris, Seoul: cross out Seoul. Círculo Paris, the last one left in its list.
7. Mansion, Apartment, corgi, cat, goldfish: cross out goldfish.
8. Mansion, Apartment, corgi, cat, Mansion: cross out Mansion. Círculo Apartment, the last one left in its list.
9. corgi, cat, corgi, cat, corgi: cross out corgi. Círculo cat, the last one left in its list.

The future of this board: an apartment, a cat, y París. Look at count 6: Seoul goes, so Paris is circled, and from then on the count jumps over the whole list of cities.

The result depends only on the magic number and on the line each option is on. On the board of this page, with the homes and six lists of four, these lines are left at the end. That is why the spiral matters: nobody should know the number before the lists are written.