The history of pick-up sticks: from ivory spillikins to Mikado

Where pick-up sticks comes from

The game is older than any of its names. Drawing one thing out of a tangle without disturbing the rest is the kind of test that turns up wherever people have had thin sticks and time, and its earliest recorded uses are not games at all.

Bundles of thin stalks were cast and read for divination across East Asia long before they were played with — the yarrow-stalk method used with the I Ching is the best known. Whether the game descends directly from that practice or simply resembles it is not something anyone can demonstrate, and honest histories of the game say so. What is documented is the moment the sticks arrive in Europe as a plaything.

Spillikins, spellicans and jackstraws

By the eighteenth century, sets of finely carved ivory and bone slivers were being exported from China to Europe, and English households played with them under the name spillikins — also spelt spellicans, and in France jonchets. The pieces were often carved into shapes with little hooks and barbs, which made removing one without stirring the rest a considerably harder problem than it is with plain rods.

In America the same game was jackstraws, and there the carved-implement sets stayed popular longest: miniature ladders, rakes, spears and saws, drawn out of the heap with a hooked stick rather than the fingers. The name survives in English as a description of something precarious — a pile of jackstraws is a pile ready to collapse.

The word spillikin outlived the ivory. It turns up in Dickens and in a century of English writing as shorthand for a delicate, fiddly business, long after most readers had stopped playing with the things.

How the sticks got their ranks

The modern game is defined by something the old sets did not have: a price list. Once the sticks are worth different amounts, the game stops being a pure test of nerve and starts being a question of which risk is worth taking — and that is what the Mikado version added.

The five ranks borrow a stylised Japanese court hierarchy: the Mikado, an old European word for the Emperor of Japan; the Mandarin, a high official; the Bonze, a Buddhist monk; the Samurai, the warrior; and the Kuli, the labourer. It is a nineteenth-century European idea of the Far East rather than anything Japanese, which is worth knowing when you meet the names, and the naming stuck because it made the values memorable.

The scoring also fixed the game's proportions, and they have not changed since: one stick worth 20, ten worth 5 or 10, and thirty worth 2 or 3. Half the value of the table is concentrated in about a quarter of the sticks, which is exactly what makes a turn worth planning.

Pick-up sticks now

The physical game never really went away — it is cheap, it packs flat and it needs no reading — but it also turned out to translate unusually well. A heap of sticks is a stack of flat objects with an order, and knowing which one lies on top of which is a problem a computer solves better than a player squinting at the table.

What a screen loses is the tremor. What it gains is certainty: no arguments about whether that stick moved, and a pile that can be dealt identically to two people in different places, which is how the version here lets two players race the same heap.

The family is still visible in modern design. Every dexterity game built on removing one piece from a fragile structure — Jenga most obviously — is playing the same hand against the same nerve.

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