the game of fingle
During a recent trip to Lake Tahoe, I was eating dinner with five other friends when we stumbled on the problem of chosing one of us to eat the last salmon ravioli. Someone suggested rock scissors paper, but the combined geekiness of me and my friends (Bill and Anne shown above, among others)overwhelmed us and we came up with a generalization of the game.
Say you have N players. Each person picks a number between 0 and N and in rock-scissors-paper style in reveals their numbers by thrusting their hand into the middle of the circle on the count of three. The number they selected is indicated by the number of fingers raised.
Players are eliminated anytime someone has chosen a number exactly one larger than them. For example if I chose three and any other players selected four, then I would be eliminated. The player who selected four would be eliminated if five had been chosen by someone else, but I would still be eliminated. That is to say, of any collection of people who select a run of numbers, only the highest survive.
As you might expect in rock-scissors-paper fashion, 0 beats N.
Someone is guaranteed to survive because there are N+1 numbers and only N people. You can choose to reduce N at this point if there is more than one survivor (which could happen if more than one person chooses the same number). Sometimes, keeping N the same is the simplest, and it prolongs the game a little since two people can circle each other for a little while before one of them gets the kill.
We called this game fingle because it uses fingers and because all good things in this day and age seem to rhyme with Google. :->