A pinch of strangeness at play
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 that someone could complicate such a simple game. However, this perspective changed when I attended a conference on traditional games in Spain.
One of the delegates demonstrated on stage the game of Morra. It 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 as to the sum of all fingers.
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