About Ask the River

Dropping things off a bridge

Everyone stands on a bridge and drops a leaf or a twig into the water on the upstream side, then runs to the other railing to see which one comes out first. It is a game people play all over the world, and it needs nothing but a river.

The good part is that once you let go, nobody can touch it. One leaf catches the fast water; another stalls behind a rock. No one arranged it, so whoever loses can laugh about it. Ask the River is that moment moved onto a screen.

Which means the mechanism for picking an order can be as plain as drawing straws. What matters is the twenty seconds before it is settled, watched by everyone at once.

What it does

• Two to ten. Every name you enter gets a leaf of its own shape.
• You choose where in the river each leaf goes in. There is an automatic placement if you would rather not.
• A full ranking at the end. You can run it again with the same leaves and a fresh river.
• The result becomes a URL. Open it anywhere and the same race runs, ending in the same order.
• Two editions: English and Japanese.

No account, no app, no charge. How to play walks through a round.

One watercolour

The screen is a single painting. There is no 3D shading, no reflection, no photographic texture. The only thing moving is the water inside the picture: a painting of a river that simply starts flowing.

While a race is running there is no text and no advertising on the screen. Nothing labelled floats on this river; which leaf is whose is a matter of shape and colour (The ten leaves).

While you are placing leaves the river is just water. You cannot see which line is quickest. The fast water, the rocks and the eddies only show themselves once things are moving.

About twenty seconds

First place is settled somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five seconds in, and the last leaf is home about thirty seconds after the start.

Things happen in that time. Leaves overtake; a leaf held by a rock gets going again and takes back what it lost. Sometimes the lead changes hands at the end, and sometimes one leaf is clear of the rest from the first second.

Ten leaves

Maple, ginkgo, daisy, willow, camellia, clover, oak, cherry, a nibbled one, and birch. Not all of them are leaves — there are petals and a flower in there for colour — and there are ten because ten is the most people who can play.

There is a page on them one by one: The ten leaves.

Names are not sent anywhere

The names you give the leaves, the spots you pick and the order that comes out never reach our servers. The names stay on the device you typed them into.

The trade-off is that a result link carries those names in readable form. Think about who you send one to (Showing a race to someone). The full account is in the Privacy Policy.

Who runs it

The site is funded by advertising. Ads appear on the written pages only, never on the race screen. Bug reports and thoughts are welcome through Contact.