history
The history of MASH: from paper fortune-telling to iPhone app
Nobody invented MASH, or if somebody did, they didn't sign it. It's a playground game. One kid writes M A S H across the top of a page, asks a friend for the names of four people they might marry, and a few minutes later announces that the friend will live in a shack with Kevin and drive a garbage truck. We've made the app version since 2008. This post is about the part before that, and a little about the part after.
Nobody wrote it down
There's no first edition of MASH, no box with the rules printed inside the lid. It moved one notebook at a time, and every kid who taught it changed something: the lists, the counting, how many options went in each list, sometimes the letters themselves.
It was on playgrounds by the 1970s. Kids in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia all claim it, so it probably started in more than one place. The rules never settled, and you can see that in the few places where somebody did write a game down.
Three kids, three rulebooks
The USC Digital Folklore Archives holds games and stories that University of Southern California folklore students collected from people they know. MASH shows up more than once. No two write-ups play the same game.
In one, a girl learned it from a friend at lunch in middle school in Downey, California. The board is a square with a list of up to four things on each side and MASH across the top. There's no spiral. The fortune teller draws sticks while the player keeps her eyes shut, until she says "Stop!" The number of sticks is the count, and you count around the square starting at the M. Her version also told you the color of your car.
In another, the fortune teller asks for a number from 1 to 10 and writes it in the middle of the page. When you count across M, A, S, H, you bounce, reversing direction every time you hit the M or the H. That version had one more list after the spouse: how it would go with that person, from "married" down to "divorced."
In a third, a girl named Trisha played it in second grade and thought it was dumb. She came around. Her group picked a number from 1 to 4, doubled it, and subtracted 3. Pick 1 and the magic number is negative one, which nobody seems to have worried about. Her lists had five options each.
None of them mentions a spiral. The spiral is the version on our printable sheet and the one we built the iPhone app around, but there were always other ways to get a number. The variations post has more.
The letters moved too
Trisha also knew MASHO, which adds an outhouse at the end, and MAPSHC, which adds a playhouse and a cardboard box. The S drifts in plenty of versions. People write Street, Shed, Sewers, or Swamp, whichever sounds worst to the person whose fortune it is. The how-to-play page has the standard four.
The homes never had to make sense as a set. They had to include one you'd be embarrassed to get.
Other games on the same page
Trisha's write-up puts MASH next to other games girls played at recess and names two of them, "true love" and "lemons." The other paper fortune teller from the same desk is the cootie catcher: folded paper, colors on the outside, fortunes under the flaps. Some groups use its spell-the-color rhyme to get their MASH number, so one recess could run both games.
2008: the App Store opens
Apple opened the App Store in July 2008, and we shipped MASH for the original iPhone that year. It kept the spiral and the counting. It also had more lists than a notebook page holds, and it saved the finished story, so nobody had to keep the worksheet in a pencil case to prove it later.
You draw the spiral with your finger. A green pen goes down the lists and crosses things off, and the cartoons are by Scott McMahon.
Where it runs now
The phone app is still free on iPhone and iPad. Version 3.5.0, on November 6, 2025, was the first Apple Watch build that plays a whole round on the watch, and 3.6.0 redrew it in January 2026. MASH 2.0 for Mac, a native rewrite, came out in August 2026. There's a Windows build, and the browser game on this site needs no signup.
The paper version still works. Print the sheet, find a friend, and count sticks the way they did in Downey at lunch.
