MASH game variations: house rules that change how you count
Putting Taylor Swift in the spouse list is still regular MASH. A variation is a rule change: how you get the magic number, or what happens when you land on an option. The how to play MASH page covers the standard spiral-and-cross-off round. This is the other pile.
What counts as a variation
Kids remix this game constantly, and most of the remixes are category swaps. Celebrity spouses. Jobs at NASA. Those belong on the MASH categories page, where you can build a set and play it. They do not change the counting.
A house rule does. After you change one, the same four names and the same magic number produce a different story. That's the test.
Shuffle the letters
Write the shack first and the page spells SHAM. Write the house first and it spells HAMS. The four dwellings are the same. The counting is the same. The odds of landing in the shack do not move. The mood does. Starting on the shack makes every other result feel like a rescue.
This site and the apps still use MASH, mansion first. Older worksheets sometimes wrote M.A.S.H. with periods between the letters. None of those spellings is a different game.
Add a fifth house, or swap the shack
The clean version always has four dwellings, because four letters is the joke. Plenty of paper games ignore that and write Tent or Cardboard Box under the H. Two different changes get lumped together:
- Swap the shack for a tent. Still four options. Each dwelling still has a 1 in 4 shot of surviving, same as the original.
- Keep the original four and add a tent as a fifth. Now the mansion is a 1 in 5. The acronym also stops working, which some people find upsetting.
The how-to-play guide already notes that the S-word is the one players like to replace. Trailer, cardboard box, "your cousin's basement." The worse the S, the louder the shack reveal.
Get the magic number without a spiral
The spiral is how most people randomize the count, and it is the version we shipped in the 2008 iPhone app. It is not the only way, and it is a pain when you are playing alone, because there is nobody to yell stop.
Clap a song
Pick a song everyone knows. Clap once per syllable. The last clap is the magic number. "Happy birthday to you" is 6. A chorus you have to look up is a bad pick, because the whole point is that nobody is choosing the number on purpose.
Some groups use the same rhyme they used on a cootie catcher: pick a color, spell it, pick a number, and that number is what you count around the MASH chart. Two playground games, one fortune.
Dice or a book
Roll a six-sided die. Open a paperback to a random page and use the last digit, skipping zero. Both cap the magic number lower than a big spiral, which makes the round faster. A 14-loop spiral is how you lose a whole lunch period to one game.
One player, eyes closed
Scribble a spiral with your eyes shut for a few seconds, then count the loops yourself. You can cheat. Everyone knows you can cheat. The honest solo version is the browser game, which draws the spiral and does the crossing-off so you cannot "accidentally" skip the shack.
Keep what you land on
Standard MASH: land on an option and you cross it out. Keep counting until one option is left in every list. Those leftovers are the fortune.
Keep-what-you-land-on: the first hit in each category is the answer. Then you start over at 1 on the next list. A round that used to take five minutes now takes forty seconds, and the fortunes get meaner, because the early hits never get a chance to be eliminated.
Same board, magic number 3:
- Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House
- Alex, Jordan, Sam, the bus driver
- 0, 2, 5, 17 kids
- Honda, shopping cart, horse, Tesla
Keep-what-you-land-on with a 3 gives you the shack, Sam, 5 kids, and a horse. In the real game, landing on the shack first means the shack is gone. You are much more likely to end up in the house. That is why people invented the slow version.
Restart the count for each category
Some groups treat the whole page as one long loop. You finish crossing off a car, hop back to the M, and keep the same running count. That is the version in our paper walkthrough.
The other school restarts at 1 every time a category is down to one survivor. Each list is its own mini-game. A brutal magic number cannot cascade from the dwellings into the spouse list. It also takes longer, because you stop and reset four or six times.
Neither one is more official. If two people at the table disagree, pick before you draw the spiral. Arguing after the shack is already crossed off is how friendships end in fifth grade.
Let someone else write your lists
The subject leaves the room. Everyone else fills in the options, including at least one name the subject would hate to marry and one job that is a trap. The subject comes back for the spiral and the counting, and does not see the page until the story is read out loud.
A milder version: you write my spouse list, I write yours, and we both stay in the room. Inside jokes land harder this way than any celebrity list, because the options are people who actually eat lunch at your table.
Do not use this with a kid who will cry if the page says they marry the vice principal. Know the room.
Paper vs the screen
Paper still wins for custom options. You can write "Mr. Henderson the gym teacher" in the margin in about two seconds. You can also lose the sheet.
The browser version draws the spiral and writes the story. No signup. It will not let you skip an option because you "miscounted." If you want a worksheet instead, grab the printable MASH sheet.
The iPhone and Apple Watch app is the 2008 game with more categories than a notebook page holds, plus saved stories so you can prove later that the spiral really did promise a mansion. We have shipped that app since the original iPhone. The Mac and Windows builds play the same round.
Fortune swap and the other how-to-play variants
A few house rules already sit on the how-to-play page, so they are only named here:
- Fortune swap: every option you cross off goes into the other player's story. You start hoping they get the shack.
- Group play: one subject, one person drawing the spiral, everybody else shouting options.
- Timed spiral: draw for ten seconds instead of waiting for someone to say stop.
- More categories: ten or twelve lists, and a round that eats half a sleepover.
If you came here looking for celebrity MASH or travel MASH, that is a category problem. Use the category builder or the longer list of category ideas.
Play a round in the browser if the paper is in the other room.