Can this really be a thing? Mheibes is a bluffing game where teams of skilled body language experts try to guess which of 45 opponents is holding a ring in one palm. How is this even possible? (NB: gift link is followed by normal link to same Atlantic article description).
Excerpt:
When you hear the game described, mheibes doesn’t sound difficult. It sounds impossible. Assembled on the court in front of al-Sheikhli were his opponents: 45 men from the city of Najaf, arranged in three neat rows. One of these players held a silver ring. It was al-Sheikhli’s job to determine which one—and in which fist he held the ring—judging only by his facial cues and other tells.
Al-Sheikhli had already made significant progress toward this goal: He and his fellow captain had narrowed the field of suspects to four. A referee in a red vest hovered nearby with a stopwatch. Each team started with just five minutes to find the ring, per that year’s tournament rules; if that time elapsed, their opponents got the point.
Now al-Sheikhli bore down on one of the remaining defenders, a middle-aged man in a light-blue robe. “Fists and face!” he barked in Baghdadi-accented Arabic. The Najaf player stretched out his arms, fists still clenched, and lifted his head to look into the captain’s eyes. He held this pose for three seconds, as required by the tournament’s rules, while al-Sheikhli scanned his face. “Taliq! ” the captain cried, while slapping at the man’s two hands in quick succession. He thought the fists were empty, and he was right. When the man exposed his palms, al-Sa’doun fans in the bleachers rose to their feet, roaring in approval.
By narrowing the field to three men, al-Sheikhli had earned his team a bit of bonus time—two extra minutes on the clock. He huddled with his fellow captain. In several earlier rounds, they’d managed to identify Najaf’s ring bearer, but had picked the wrong hand and lost the point. “It was the Najaf fists,” al-Sheikhli told me later. “They were difficult.” When the captains broke their huddle, al-Sheikhli called to the crowd, his arms outstretched. The al-Sa’doun fans answered with another cheer. Now he turned on one of the three remaining suspects, a young man with shaggy hair and his jacket pulled up around his neck—a common move to hide the pulsing of the carotid artery. Al-Sheikhli called for “fists and face” again, and the referee pulled back the man’s hair so that his face was fully visible. For the full three seconds, the captain stared him down. Finally, he gestured to the man’s right hand. “Ji ib,” he said. Give it to me. The man opened his hand, and the stadium lights reflected, at last, on a glint of silver.
Great article about a fascinating game! I want to play!
I used to be a teacher and this is the sort of thing I would have loved to do with kids during a break. Elementary aged kids would probably have a hard time not laughing and giving it away immediately. But, would I be teaching them how to be dishonest or even lie? It seems benign to me, but I suspect there would be people who wouldn’t want kids playing.
We played Heads Up Seven Up when we were in elementary school and it was raining during recess. It’s a very very simple but similar bluffing game.
Kind of akin to those Mafia games that used to get played here-I’d try to follow them but could never figure out how someone ID’ed another player who was on the Scum team.
Similar to Mafia played in person, maybe. Online, even though the mechanics might be the same, the dynamic is very different: On the one hand, you don’t have tone of voice, body language, suppressed laughter, etc., but on the other hand, you have a perfect log of everything everyone’s said and when, so it’s easier to pin down inconsistencies.
At least some of this game would also be physical, because even though a ring is small, it’s not quite zero size, and so a fist holding a ring would be a slightly different shape than one holding nothing. You could mask this somewhat by keeping your hands loose, but then, you also don’t want them to be so loose that you risk the ring accidentally falling out, or showing a glint of silver between a gap in fingers.
That game sounds incredible - what would be a fun party game turned into a gruelling psychological battle.
We used to play something similar in Scotland, which interestingly was called Ali Baba although I doubt it has any actual connection with the Middle East. The basic idea was the same, except teh object to be concealed was a ball and there was a ritualised set of moves, alternately showing one hand then the other, turning fully around etc. in front of the “Ali Baba” while chanting:
"Ali Baba, Ali Baba who’s got the ball?
I’ve not got it
In my pocket
Ali Baba, Ali Baba who’s got the ball?.
The trick of course was not just hiding the ball when you had it, it was making it look plausibly like you might have it when you didn’t.
Of course, what you’re teaching is how to detect lies, a valuable skill in life. Is it possible to do that without also having kids lie, and competitively incentivising them to get good at lying, in exactly the same way that it’s hard to teach catching without also teaching throwing?
Some people see a glass half full, that’s all I’m saying.
I’d need to see the incentives of all participants. This game looks very easy to rig.
I mean, any game is easy to rig, if some of your opponents are in on it. If this were one event, I might share your skepticism, but this is apparently an established game with a history of competition. Surely, not every event is rigged?
The game of finding the ring bearer was played thousands of years ago. Sauron was really bad at it.
We used to play a ‘ring on a string’ game that seems like it might be slightly related - I was going to write a description of it, but this article says everything I was going to write: