Strange Games

How many of us have played rock, paper, scissors? We played it all the time in school—sometimes just as a game, sometimes to decide who would play first in a game, and sometimes to break a tie. 

I remember a few years ago watching an episode of the popular TV show The Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon comes up with a new version of rock, paper, scissors called “rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock.” I was amused by the show. I never thought too much about it, except that it was incredible how someone could complicate such a simple game. 

However, this perspective changed when I attended the conference. It was an eye-opener for me. 

One of the delegates demonstrated on stage the game of Morra. Morra is a more sophisticated version of rock, paper, scissors and is played in various versions across Europe. It is a hand game that I understand dates back thousands of years to ancient Roman and Greek times. While there are many variations of Morra, most forms can be played with a minimum of two players. In the most popular version, the players throw out a single hand, each showing zero to five fingers, and call out their guess at what the sum of all fingers shown will be. If one player guesses the sum, that player earns one point. The first player to reach three points wins the game.

What I found interesting, as I was talking to people, is that Morra is actually banned in some places because the game can get very heated. When wine flows freely, the crowds can become uncontrollable.

Another unusual game was demonstrated by a team from France—barrel rolling. These were giant barrels used to store wine, and the team was rolling the barrel. Now, that sounds very simple, but imagine a large barrel lightly tipped on its side. You cannot let it stop, and you need to keep it rolling. 

That’s hard enough. It’s even harder when you need to do this in the hot sun and keep it going for half an hour. But what makes it even harder? 

Their rolling was literally a dance with split-second timing—passing barrels to one another, weaving in and out. At one point, they had six people stand in a line with another person at the other end of the basketball court. They asked me to stand in front of the line to videotape the event. 

One participant came rolling the barrel and literally inches away from us, let the barrel go. He then ran down the left side of the line while the barrel rolled down the right. He picked it up again at the other end of the line while it was still rolling. That kind of split-second timing while rolling a barrel was something truly incredible.  

I did try my hand at barrel rolling and found it incredibly difficult. That was truly embarrassing as they had little kids rolling the barrel with ease!

I’m sure there are many of these fascinating activities in our Indian villages that we don’t even know about. To discover them, document them, and showcase to the world. would surely be something people of all ages would love.