How to Play: Ninja
A turn-based folk game of frozen poses and taps on the hand that spread through U.S. campuses from nowhere. Richard Lemarchand explains how it is played.
Like a ninja that stalks the night, this folk game about deception and body language has turned up mysteriously around several U.S. campuses quite recently. But no one knows where Ninja originated. A turn-based “open-air” game, Ninja is an intimate, intellectual kind of human chess based on reading your opponents’ face and body language and using that to your advantage. Naughty Dog lead designer Richard Lemarchand learned the game from Eric Zimmerman at IndieCade, and lends his knowledge and experience to this “How To”.
“I think it was late on a Friday night. I was walking towards the Culver Hotel which acts as sort of the social hub of the conference…and I saw these people who kind of stood around posed like statues frozen in what seemed to be martial arts poses.”—Richard Lemarchand, on seeing Ninja for the first time.
