Rock, Paper, Scissors

I was playing rock, paper, scissors with Ben and Abby the other day. The game started pretty normal, with the usual elements (rock, paper, scissors) and hierarchy. Then other things started to creep in. First it was ground, fire, rain and wind (which made me wonder if they were studying medieval medicine or alchemy in school), then gun and bomb got added. These things were added slowly at first and then in a flurry of one-upmanship. Nobody really seemed to mind if you added something. The relationship between rock, paper and scissors was always straight forward. The relationship between some of the others was pretty fluid and situational. As far as I could tell most of the time rain beats fire, as does wind, and ground beats rock. Gun beats rock, paper and scissors. Gun doesn’t seem to hold much sway over ground or wind, which seemed vaguely logical, but it doesn’t necessarily win either – it really depends on what the third person has. Bomb beats most anything, but it seems like if you use it too much everyone just gets mad, so it drops out after one or two uses. The winner was sometimes defined by who hadn’t won in a while or who was crying because of the injustice of it all.