Home › The games › Rock Paper Scissors
✊ Rock Paper Scissors
Rock paper scissors, best of five. It is not luck: against a real person it is pattern reading.
- 2 players
- Classic
- In your browser, free
- With friends or against bots
Best of five
Five rounds, simultaneous secret choice. Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock. Whoever wins more rounds takes the match.
Why it is not a coin flip
Against a random number generator, rock paper scissors genuinely is a lottery and there is nothing to be done. Against a person, it is not — because people are not random, and this is well documented:
- Players who lose a round tend to switch to whatever would have beaten it.
- Players who win tend to repeat.
- Nobody plays the same throw three times in a row without feeling strange about it — even when repeating is the correct play.
- Rock is the most common opening, especially from people in a hurry.
Five rounds is too short for anything sophisticated, but it is exactly long enough for the first of those to show up. If your opponent just lost with scissors, there is a good chance their next throw is rock.
The only honest counter
If you want to be genuinely unpredictable, do not try to 'think of something random' — humans are terrible at it. Use an external rule: the second hand of a clock, the first letter of the last message you received, anything that does not come from you.
Draws do not count
The same throw from both sides scores nothing and the round simply continues. So 'best of five' means best of five decided rounds, and a match where both players think alike can run considerably longer than five throws.
That has a practical effect almost nobody notices: repeating your throw after a draw is safer than it looks, because opponents almost always switch after drawing.
More classics on Arcade Zone
-
🏓 Pong
The classic of classics, and the most complex game here under the hood. Two modes, up to four players, and the ball speeds up while the rally lasts.
-
✖ Tic-Tac-Toe
Tic-tac-toe with an infinite mode that solves the draw problem: only your last three marks stay on the board.
-
🚢 Battleship
Battleship for up to four, where a hit gives you an extra turn — and two modes that change who you are shooting at.