The question marks in the description below are of the things I don’t quite remember, and may very well be wrong.
You started by creating a set of lists of different things - like types of houses, numbers of children, types of husband, types of jobs? All sorts of things were possible as options, but I think there had to be a certain number of lists, and a certain number of items on each list? The idea was to have some realistic and some “silly” answers listed as options.
Then someone drew a spiral… until someone else said stop? And then somehow that got applied to the different lists of things to get your fortune.
Anyone remember the exact process, or what those things were?
I remember this game well. We used to play it all the time in middle school, especially during school trips or long bus rides. I grew up in NYC in the late 80s/early 90s, and we called it MASH (Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House), but I’d be curious to see if there were regional/era differences. You’ve pretty much got the premise down, but here’s how my friends and I used to play.
One person is the fortune teller, who writes down all the suggestions, and one person is the fortune tellee, although there were always two or three other girls who watched the game and offered answers.
The list always started with MASH at the top, and from there you could decide on the categories you wanted to play with. There was no set number, but we typically played with about 10 - 12 categories, such as Number of Kids, Career, Husband, City, Car, Honeymoon spot, etc.
Within each category, there’d about 4 - 6 possible answers, offered up by the group as a whole, generally based upon the preferences of the fortune tellee. As you mentioned, there’d usually be 3-4 desirable/decent answers and 1 oor 2 undesirable/jokeys answer. So for the Husband category, for example, you’d have three hot actors, the cute 8th grader you had a crush on, and the creepy janitor or something.
Once the categories and answers were set, the fortune teller would begin to draw a spiral, and then sometime later the fortune tellee would say “Stop.” Then you counted up the lines in the spiral, and that gave you your elimination number. So if the fortune tellee stopped at 5 lines in the spiral, then you went down the list and eliminated every fifth answer until you were only left with one in each category, and that was your future.
So for a sample first round with an elimination number of 5, your sheet would look something like this:
MASH
Mansion
Apartment
Shack
House
Husband
[del]Brad Pitt[/del]
Creepy McCreeperson
George Clooney
Johnny Depp
Number of Kids
1
[del]5[/del]
19
0
Etc.
So at the end of the game, the fortune tellee would find out that they’d grow up to live in an red Apartment in Hawaii with Creepy McCreeperson and their 19 kids, would drive a Schwinn bicycle to their job as a Dogfood Tester, and live to be 22 years old.
ps - we called it MASH also, but it was so long ago I couldn’t remember. Funny how some things stick in the mind and some don’t.
I also remember having lots of fun with totally-joking sets, where every answer was wildly inappropriate or impossible, and seeing how terribly you could get them to all contrast - like being a Nun with 300 kids living on the moon in an aquarium with your husband Tom Cruise.
Don’t recall the name, but remember this game VIVIDLY! I grew up near Boston in the late 80’s FWIW. And I concur it being a game usually played by girls.
I remember playing this too, but I remember it being played pretty much equally by both boys and girls, though it was usually with both from what I remember, so maybe the girls played it more by themselves and I just didn’t see. I even remember it being played up into Middle School. We also called it MASH and the rules were pretty much exactly what Cabot laid out.
