The MASH Game

We all grew up with big dreams. For some of us, it was to have a blossoming career. For others, to raise a happy and healthy family. There are some of us out there however, with more pre-specified ambitions.

Namely that you're going to marry Screech from Saved by the Bell, live in a mansion in the United Arab Emirates, have 12 children, and drive your purple subcompact car to your job as a housewife everyday.

Sound odd? Absolutely! But if the fates proclaim it, so shall it be.

The fates we're talking about here are admittedly less professional than your run-of-the-mill neighborhood psychic or carnival palm reader. Regardless of their questionable credentials, we trusted these fortune seers to predict for us a decidedly silly, squeal-inducing future. These were our peers on the playground, and they held in their hands our very fates.

The brilliance of MASH was that it became a universally known and widely accepted practice among children in the 80s and 90s. If you were to have stopped by nearly any elementary school and asked if they would like to play MASH, no one would look at you questioningly or jump in to discuss the preachy-ness of Alan Alda's television directing career. They would grab a pencil and a piece of looseleaf and start prophesying.

One of the main elements we all loved so dearly about MASH was the ability to lightly humiliate our friends by assigning to them less-than-stellar options in any of the preselected categories. The categories usually ran a little something like this, with at least 5 options listed per category:

MASH
This one was a constant; the game's namesake. MASH stood for Mansion-Apartment-Shack-House. These were your choices for living accommodations. In some circles, more creative (read: cruel) options were added, but this was the basic underlying foundation of the game. This was one of the more important categories, as we all assumed money would make us outstandingly, incomparably happy. And they say kids don't learn anything from TV.

Boys'/Girls' Names
Depending on your gender, you were ordered to name 5 people of the opposite sex. When meaner kids were running the show, they would get to select the options for you, but usually you had some say in who was listed. It was requisite to list your crush, unattainable famous people, and at least one unsavory kid; this was usually the kid who picked his nose in the back of the classroom or was forever regaling his classmates with stories about what happened last night on his ant farm. It was generally understood that the more appalling and undesirable options you listed, the more hilarity would ensue when your moment of fortune-telling came to fruition.

However, if you were lucky enough to bag JTT or Tatyana Ali in a game of recess MASH, you were certainly entitled to bragging rights for the remainder of the school day.

Jobs
This one was pretty self-explanatory, but it was always fun seeing what wacky undesirably professions one could add to the list of possibilities. Garbage collector? Septic tank engineer? Cootie quarantiner? Sure, you can always throw in some of the standard Doctor/Lawyer/Teacher/Housewife fare, but that was never quite as humorous or entertaining.

Gender role-reversal was also popular. A male housewife? An instant classic!

Cars
Again, the money=happiness paradigm reigned supreme. Sure, a Corvette or a Lamborghini would be nice, but what's that when you could have a broken down AMC Hornet?* What, I ask you?

Some versions also included car colors, which are not inherently funny but accurately reflect a child's disproportional sense of humor. A pink car? For a boy? Oh my god. Pink. And for those of us who dreamed of one day owning a shocking fuchsia Maserati, well, this was our chance. That is, if you didn't get stuck with the puce Buick instead.

City/Location
One of the games more practical aspects, we all were truly curious about where we were going to end up. However, as children our worldview was relatively limited, so we frequently had our pick of 5 neighboring suburbs of our then current location. A kid can dream, can't he?

Number of Children
This was a pretty obvious dimension; two or three were preferable, six was sort of a bummer, and ten was ridiculous. Bear in mind the Duggar family of 18 Kids and Counting fame were not yet being broadcast into our susceptible minds weekly, so we were under the impression that there was some sort of a finite cap on how many children one could feasibly physically produce. Unfortunately, most of the options listed in this category were pretty reasonable and rational and hence lacked the shock value of some of the more outlandish categories. Depending on your foreseen mate, however, the shock value could fluctuate significantly.



Once all the lists had been generated, the real fun could begin in a tedious, meticulous fashion uncharacteristic of otherwise attention spanless children. At this point, there were several ways in which to randomly select a benchmark number, all of which were terminated by the fortune seeker saying, "Stop!" Usually, you would draw spirals or tally marks and whenever the MASHee indicated for you to stop. Whatever the number of circles or tallies drawn would serve as your reference point number. If your number was four, you would start at the top, count down four items, and cross off the fourth. From that one you would count another four, cross out the list item you landed on, and so on and so forth until you had one item remaining in each category.

For those of you to whom this makes no sense at all (and let's be honest, if you never or rarely played this game, this is a pretty shaky explanation), I invite you to play the online version for illustrative and/or enjoyment purposes. Go on, I'll wait.

Online MASH game

If you ended up with less than spectacular results, fear not; the beauty of MASH is that it can be played repeatedly until you finally achieve your desired outcome. Much like a Magic 8 Ball could be shaken again and again until it displayed the coveted response, so too could MASH be reformulated and re-tabulated umpteen times.

So go ahead, keep playing. I think you'll find that despite your current status as a so-called adult, this game retains its novelty. For those of you lucky enough to possess an iPhone but are currently living in tenuous fear of being caught slacking by your boss/parent/significant other/roommate/pet, don't worry. As the iPhone commercials so helpfully inform us, "there's an app for that":



Feel free to drop your MASH results in the comment box.


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*My dad once owned an AMC Hornet. One day, he came outside and found that someone had stolen his driver's side door. His driver's side door. This story is completely unrelated (especially since it happened in the 70s) but it is also true and hilarious and therefore must be shared.