Ancient Hand Games Like Rock Paper Scissors From Around the World

Rock paper scissors feels like it was invented yesterday — three gestures, one round, done in two seconds. But the idea behind it, two people settling something instantly with nothing but their hands, is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Long before "rock beats scissors" existed, cultures on opposite sides of the world had already worked out their own versions. Here are a few of the strangest and oldest.

Egypt: the first finger game on record

The earliest evidence of a hand-gesture game isn't Chinese or Japanese at all. Tomb paintings at Beni Hasan in Egypt, roughly 4,000 years old, show two people facing off with their hands, playing something close to a finger-guessing game. Nobody knows the exact rules anymore, but the shape of it, two players, bare hands, an instant result, is unmistakable.

Rome: finger-flashing in the dark

The Romans called their version micare digitis, literally "flashing with the fingers." Each player threw out a number of fingers at the same moment and both had to guess the total. It was everywhere in Roman life, from street corners to soldiers drawing lots, and it eventually gave the game its lasting name across southern Europe: morra.

The game was trusted enough to become a measure of a person's character. A Latin saying held that a truly honest man was one you could safely play micare with in complete darkness, since there'd be no way to catch him cheating. Morra is still played today in parts of Italy and China, essentially unchanged after two thousand years.

Japan: the games before jan-ken

We've written before about how rock paper scissors traveled from China to Japan and became jan-ken. What we didn't cover is what came before jan-ken settled into its modern three-move form.

The earliest version, mushi-ken, used three gestures with real animal logic: a frog (thumb) beat a slug (pinky), the slug beat a snake (index finger), and the snake beat the frog back. It's the exact same three-way cycle as rock paper scissors, just with a food chain instead of household objects.

Even more unusual was kitsune-ken, which broke from the one-hand format entirely. Players used both hands to form the shape of a fox, a hunter, or a village headman, in a rock-paper-scissors-style triangle where the fox outwits the headman, the headman commands the hunter, and the hunter shoots the fox. It's a small reminder that the "one hand, one gesture" rule we take for granted wasn't always the standard.

Why the same idea kept showing up

Egypt, Rome, and Japan never traded notes on hand games, and yet they all landed on a version of the same core idea: use bare hands to produce an instant, unpredictable, and hard-to-cheat result. No board, no dice, no equipment to lose or argue over. That's a remarkably good design, which is probably why it kept getting reinvented instead of forgotten.

Hands weren't the only tool people reached for, either — plenty of ancient cultures settled things with a board and a set of pieces instead.

Try the version that won

Out of all of these, the three-gesture cycle that came out of Japan is the one that stuck, and it's still the fastest way for two people to settle something fairly. Skip the finger-flashing and play a round online against a friend or a random opponent right now.