Requirements
Objective
Description
This game involves the same element that is in Green Glass Doors (Wally’s World), Black Magic, the Hat Game, and Johnny Johnny Whoop. That element is that there is a trick to how the game works, and the player(s) need to figure out the trick to understand the game’s answer.
The rock thrower must know the trick for the game to work correctly. The rock thrower can either play the game by themselves to someone or a group of people, or the thrower can perform the game with someone or several people that know the trick, to misdirect/distract the player(s) that do not know the trick.
The game begins with the thrower saying the opening narration:
“The name of the game is rocks,
Rocks is the name of the game.
Count how many rocks I throw,
Here we go.”
That person then proceeds to pick up invisible rocks and throw them away from the player(s). Let’s say that the rock thrower picked up and threw 3 invisible rocks.
They then ask the player(s), “How many rocks did I just throw?” The answer that is given by the player(s) will most likely be 3, but in this game, the thrower threw 7.
The trick to finding the answer actually has nothing to do with the narration or how many invisible rocks are picked up and thrown; to find out the answer, you must count how many words are said when the thrower asks how many rocks were thrown. For example, the thrower could pick up and throw 4 invisible rocks, but if the thrower only says, “How many?” then they only threw 2 rocks.
If a player gives the correct answer, get them to play again to make sure they don’t win the game by randomly guessing a number. If a player thinks they know the trick, then they can whisper their guess to the thrower, and the thrower can tell them whether or not they understand the trick.
The misdirection is the most fun / most anger-inducing part of the rock game (depending on if you know the trick or not), and there are multiple ways to distract people from figuring out the trick:
– emphasizing the opening narration to make the player(s) think the trick is in it
– throwing “boulders” and/or “sand”, so that the player(s) think that the answer is the number of normal size rocks
– clapping or talking in the middle of throwing the rocks to distract the player(s) from their thoughts
– throwing half the number of rocks that the number of words your question has, and vice versa
