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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

That sounds awesome, but how does a 3k game of hide & seek actually work? I mean, by home rules growing up, one person was "it" and had to find everyone. That would suck. One person would have to find 2999 others, and most of them would just be stuck stuck under an Espevar, waiting.

This is an important problem to solve. I call on the engineers of this site to find a solution to the hide & seek scaling problem. Let's get to work!

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You might be interested in the hide-and-seek variant Sardines. One person hides, with a group of seekers. Seekers that find the one who hides have to hide with them, until one seeker is left. There is nothing like the feeling of looking around, encountering fewer and fewer other seekers, until you are alone with the knowledge that you just lost.

The first excellent episode of British TV series Inside No. 9 revolves around a game of Sardines. Wholeheartedly recommended, for pitch-perfect Brit dark humour

Just watched it now. Gosh that was weird and strangely captivating. Also, literally every single person spoke with their own uniquely wonderful accent and mannerism - odd thing to notice and comment on but it made it that much better. Looking forward to the rest of this series.

Whole series is totally amazing!

Oh yes, Sardines was great fun! Very popular among teens when I was that age.

Which definitely had nothing to do with the possibility of finding yourself squeezed into a confined space with the person you had a crush on. Definitely.

Well done for finding the right phrasing. That was my first thought too but the phrase I had in mind wasn't politically correct so I didn't comment.

That was precisely the aspect we enjoyed the most, though I hesitated to note that detail when posting earlier.

It wasn't the only fun part though. Someone would always start giggling and give away the hideout.

Also seek-and-hide.

We used to do this in a giant church. One time the police came due to an alarm that went off and the youth leader was in the bathroom with a bunch of kids LOL

Sardines is a central part of the plot of The Demolished Man[0], the first Hugo award winning novel.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demolished_Man

How can you ever be sure if you've lost?

I had assumed it was one of those where the players who are found join the seeking team. I think that tends to scale because the seekers usually have explosive growth as the poorly-hidden players are rapidly converted.

That makes it sound rather Borg like.

But the poorly hidden players are exactly the ones who are worse at finding clever hiding spots!

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. They can simply cover more ground and brute force it.

When the seeker gets pissed off enough about how well people are hiding, they take the people they found and go inside and watch a movie.

As grownups, maybe the bar, or just hang out in the Ikea food court?

That sounds about right, "I found 100 people. I'm done. Time to get a hotdog and something with lingonberry in it."

Two hotdogs, one with jam?

Everyone person who is found becomes a seeker as well. That way at the end you have 2999 people seeking 1 person.

Maybe 2999 people had to find the one?

I think that would usually be called a reverse-hide & seek.

I think we used to call it Pink Panther.

This would work much better and is actually a great variant I play with my family (although 3k is still a bit crowded). One hides, everyone seeks, if you find, you join hiding.

This has some neat extra elements, such as tactics ("I think I found them but I first need to misdirect and lose these guys"), gymnastics ("Found, so how am I going to fit my big ass into this tiny, already overcrowded spot"), and most importantly shared shadenfreude ("How are we supposed to hold our laughs if the last seeker just strolls by with all of us packed here?").

Highly recommended

This game was called "sardines" in my childhood neighborhood.

Start with a scrum master ...

Oh no, no no no, Agile hide & seek is just plain wrong

But they do need a hide and seek manifesto at least.

A bunch of childish young adults inconvenience a bunch of shoppers and employees at a big box store and the police for no good reason.

"To have fun" is a good reason.

Yes. Fun for the people playing. Fun, at the expense of the people I was talking about. Maybe I am too cranky, but it seems really frivolous and thoughtless. Given all the mass shootings at retailers, it seems like it could cause too many people anxiety or other distress to be worth it.

The game was in Scotland not America. The rest of the world isn't afraid of being shot when they go to ikea.

Fun is not a zero-sum game, thankfully

Why do you assume the players were young, and how were the other people inconvenienced? (And why does inconvenience outweigh the players' enjoyment?)

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