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ITO 糸

Threading the needle…

How to play Ito

  1. Everyone is dealt a secret number from 1 to 100. You can see only your own.
  2. A theme appears — how frightening, how expensive, how loud. Describe your number as a thing on that scale, without saying any number.
  3. Then play the cards in ascending order, lowest first. Getting it wrong does not end the game — every card you skipped over is cut from the thread and costs one life. Lose all three and it snaps.
  4. Nobody has a turn. Anyone may play at any moment, which is the whole tension: the longer you wait to be sure, the more likely somebody below you waits too.

An example

The theme is how frightening. You are holding 73, so you say “a wasp in the car”. Someone holding 12 says “a slightly cold bath”. Now the table has to decide who goes first. If 73 goes down before 12, the 12 is cut from the thread and shown to everyone, and the table loses one life — two lives if it skipped two people. You play on with what is left, which is why a bad round early is survivable and a bad round late is not.

2–10 players · about 15–30 minutes · suggested from age 9 · free, no sign-up, plays in any browser.