Rock Paper Scissors Fire Gun Water Nuclear Explosion

Today is movie day but my moviegoing has been adversely affected by the following factors: no good movies, I am lazy, the NFL.

So, courtesy of the Backwards City Review's blog, here's an little time waster, an update/expansion on the old Rock Paper Scissors game, simply knowns as RPS-15.

Interesting to note, my friend Tim and I actually created an updated version of RPS when we were in high school. It was, of course, a drinking game (and I'm sure we weren't the only restless kids drinking in cornfields in small towns making up RPS drinking games).

Ours was called Rock Paper Scissors Fire Gun Water Nuclear Explosion (RPSFGWNE), and it was, far as I can tell, pretty similar to RPS 15. We had fewer "gestures," which was important when you were drinking in the middle of a cornfield, since most games tended to end in tangential arguments about whether a gun would actually live through a nuclear explosion (hey -- we didn't say it would still be relevant, we just said it would still be around).

You can guess the gesture for gun. For nuclear explosion you kind of held your palm upwards and flat, as if you were checking for rain, then made a whooshing sound and pushed upwards. Anything with gun or nuclear explosion was, of course, multiplied by two, in terms of drinks awarded, because it was, after all, a life or death matter.

RPSFGWNE also included the additional and unnamed gesture of "Fuck," which beat everything and for which the loser had to drink half his beer. As long as nobody else threw Fuck. If more than one person threw Fuck, then everybody who Fucked had to drink their whole beer.

So there you have it, my gift to you. Grab a case of Busch, hit the nearest cornfield, and enjoy.