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Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Amidakuji.

While abroad, we learn quite a lot even from very young children. When foreign

colleagues invite us to their houses we get to talk to their children. With grown up

children it is always two way communications. I ask about their school and education,their future plans, their hobbies etc. They too have a number of questions to ask like why

I do not eat beef, why I am a teetotaler, do Indian youth fall in love and so on. With

smaller children who are as shy as Indian children it takes some time to befriend them by

offering some sort of entertainment, with their parents as interpreters. And it is through

the small Japanese children you see in the topmost picture I learnt about some games like

Amidakuji, Jan-Ken-Pon and Chopsticks.

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I have found Amidakuji very interesting, it is a sort of lottery purely based on luck and

it is played on a piece of paper. It is impossible to manipulate the results! As you can see

in Fig.1 above, a paper is folded vertically and opened up to form creases equivalent to

the number of players or instead light vertical lines are drawn. At the bottom of each linea ranking, a gift, a reward or a winner/winners and losers are indicated. As a sample; in

Fig.2 above, I have indicated rankings 1 to 5 in some random order.

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With the rankings or gifts portion kept folded and hidden from the players / participants,

each player is then asked to choose a vertical line and write his name or initials at the top

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of the line as show in Fig.3.

Then each player, one after another is asked to draw horizontal lines connecting any

adjacent vertical lines. Each player can add any number of horizontal lines as per his

choice between any two vertical lines. For clarity, I have asked the players in this samplegame as shown in Fig.4 to use different colored pens to mark their horizontal lines. Usage

of color pens is not required, any pen would do.

Then you may unfold the rewards section and start determining the winners as follows.

Starting from the vertical line originating from the name of the player trace down the path

with a pen until you reach a horizontal line, then move along the horizontal line and when

you reach the end of the horizontal line move down along the vertical line there, until you

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reach the reward location. Follow this procedure for each participant as shown in the

sample Figures 5,6,7,8 and 9, below:

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Amidakuji is simple, but with astonishing results. Try it, you will like and appreciate it.Thanks to the lovely children who taught me the game.