Why satay sticks?

Pick-up sticks needs a pile of long thin sticks and a flat table. A hawker centre has both, so this version drops satay skewers and plastic chopsticks on a round marble table.

On a real table the hard part is a steady hand. On a phone screen the hard part is your eyes. Read the crossings and find the sticks with nothing on top. Every one of the 40 piles was checked by a program to make sure it can be cleared without a single wobble.

A bit of real pick-up sticks history

The game has many names. In Britain it was spillikins, sometimes spelled spellicans. Jackstraws is another old English name, and pick-up sticks is the name most people know today. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest record of spillikins is a rhyme from 1734 about taking “your game at spilakees”.

Nobody knows for sure where it began. Encyclopaedia Britannica says it is supposed to be very old and perhaps started in China, and museum notes in London say much the same. Some writers link it to the yarrow stalks once used for fortune-telling with the I Ching. Neither idea is backed by an early record, so treat both as guesses.

Victorian sets were often made of bone or ivory, and many came with a small hook for teasing a stick out of the pile. The rules printed with an English set in the Victoria and Albert Museum are the ones still used now. Each player removes one piece at a time, and a turn lasts until you move a piece other than the one you are after.

In France the game is called jonchets. The Académie française dates the word to the 1400s and links it to jonc, the French word for a rush. Across much of Europe today, boxed sets are sold as Mikado. In the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, the Schoenhut toy company of Philadelphia sold a tube of 40 painted wooden sticks as “456 Pick Up Sticks”.

Some sources link the game to the gambling sticks of the Haida people on Canada’s Pacific coast. The Haida Gwaii Museum describes a different game, where sticks were hidden in bundles of cedar bark for the other team to guess.

How to play

• Tap a stick to lift it out of the pile. Hold and slide to choose a different stick.
• A stick comes out cleanly when nothing is lying on it. If another stick crosses over it, or a tip rests on it, the pile wobbles and your stick stays where it is. The sticks that moved glow red for a moment.
• Levels: clear the whole pile before you run out of wobbles. The first piles have 6 sticks and 5 wobbles to spare. The last has 36 sticks and 3.
• Stars: 3 for no wobbles, 2 for one wobble, 1 for clearing the pile. The hint button makes a free stick glow. A level cleared with a hint gets up to 2 stars.
• 2 players: take turns on one phone. Keep picking until the pile wobbles, then pass the phone. Satay sticks are worth 1 point, red chopsticks 2, green 3, blue 5 and the gold chopstick 10. The most points wins.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.
• Earn 3 stickers in this game for your QuickBOP sticker book.

Tips for reading a pile

Follow the whole stick. A stick can look free in the middle and still have a tip resting on one end.

Look at the edges. Where two sticks cross, the one on top keeps its dark outline all the way across. The one underneath is cut off by it.

Use the shadows. A stick high in the pile throws a long shadow onto the sticks below it. Long shadows usually mean a stick near the top.

Your turn

The first pile is waiting on the table at the top of this page. Six sticks, one crossing, and plenty of wobbles to spare. See how far into the supper rush you can get without moving a single stick.