MASH (game)

MASH is a paper and pencil fortune telling game played mostly by children, its name an acronym for the four possible home types a player might end up living in: mansion, apartment, shack and house. Two or more players fill in categories such as future spouse, number of children, career and vehicle with several possible answers each, then one player draws a spiral while another calls out stop, and the number of lines the spiral crosses becomes a counting number. Players use that number to count around the list of answers, crossing one off each time it is reached, until only one answer remains in every category. The surviving answers are read out as the player's predicted future, in the spirit of a lighthearted party game rather than a serious prediction. MASH is played informally with no fixed publisher or rulebook, passed on among schoolchildren and documented in folklore studies of playground games from the 1980s onward, with many regional variations in the categories used and in the letters that stand for each housing type.