Rock Paper Scissors Solitaire | Hacker News Reader

Rock Paper Scissors Solitaire

klezlab.it

38 pointsklez20 comments

I miss being so bored that you invent such games. I need to pack myself off for a holiday and leave my digital life behind for a few days, maybe where there is a piano and a nice view to paint.

If you don't have a dice, you can mentally roll one. Think of a bunch of numbers and add them all together, then add every digit of that number, and so on until you end up with a single digit from 1 to 9. 1, 2 and 3 is rock, 4, 5 and 6 is paper and 7, 8 and 9 is scissors.

For example: 23+42 (or 2+3+4+2 if that's easier for you to do, the result will be the same) = 65 → 6+5 = 11 → 1+1 = 2, rock.

Great to fall asleep, given how boring the game must be. I use that dice system in bed but in a RPG game (1 = "No, and also..."; 2,3,4 = "No"; 5 = "Yes, but..."; 6,7,8 = "Yes"; 9 = "Yes, and also...").

My grandfather, was a chess-meister, not of huge proportions, but well known in our city. Chess was almost like a diseases (he did not taught my father and his brother in the game, knowing the pain and suffering this would bring later in life)... So one thing he did when he was back home from the local chess club, is to play against himself - replaying old moves, or by the book, or something new, just heard. He would also this with other games - like bridge (or similar). He was truly a genius in his own, and I'm sure he had good time, but he understood really well that it was not good habit long term.

Some people find comfort this way, sometimes it's the only way to get through

Interesting variant. I might program it for some of the «Rock-Paper-Scissors extensions» here:

https://rakuforprediction.wordpress.com/2025/03/03/rock-pape...

Some of the extensions would need polyhedral dices:

https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/OpenDiceRolls/

This is genius!

I was not expecting such an elegant way to deal with PvP in an analog action solitaire game, excellent!!

>This is genius!

if you don't have dice, use a coin, heads beats whatever you choose, tails loses to it. then, quicker if you don't choose, heads you lose, tails you win.

with the coin you don't get ties, but ties you just shoot again so it hardly disturbs the outcome of the game.

bigger genius.

Sometimes I think I'm the only person on the planet that grew up knowing it as "Rock Scissors Paper".

I still defend that as the best name in English. Rock needs to go first. Rock beats Scissors beats Paper. It's the most straightforward order.

Is there a niche "endian" humor about this :) - e.g. is this the little endian, or big endian, or "middle" endian of "Rock Paper Scissors" - excuse my really poor attempt at this.

If you call it Rock-Paper-Scissors it still follows logically:

Rock loses to Paper loses to Scissors

Why would you want to describe it as "loses to" rather than "beats"? People want to win, not lose.

Or any other ordering

Yes, but I was specifically choosing the one that is by far the most popular one; at least in American English.

That rings a bell, as in I think I had some classmates as a kid who called it that, and I remember thinking they were weird. I'd guess it was maybe 1:3 in favor of RPS over RSP.

I grew up calling it "Paper Scissors Rock"!

in german it’s

“Schere Stein Papier”

Ditto with Snakes and Ladders and the Goose game (juego de la oca in Spanish), with a similar gameplay. And Yahtzee.

Parchís? "¡Oca, oca, tira porque me/te toca!"

Parchís is Parcheese/Ludo, the four colored, squared racing board game. Here the player can choose between one and four pieces to move once the full set it's outside the 'home'.

With Oca/Snakes and Ladders and such, the outcome it's the same with 0, 1 and N players. You just throw a dice and watch the events.

Ah! Yes, you're right, I think we had one board with Parchís on one side and Oca on the other so we never really named the Oca game (which we almost never played since it's more boring because it lacks player agency).

Oca could be improved by having to win with two or three tokens and placing 'attacking' items a la Mario Kart in the board. Less randomness for the game at least.

Because even a paper and pen racing game with vectors can be more fun than Oca without any special slots to fall into.

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