The ten leaves
Every name is handed one leaf, and no two are the same shape. Ten in all. No name tags float on the river, so shape and colour are all you have.
The ten
- Maple — a hand. The deep cuts make it the easiest of the ten to pick out from a distance.
- Ginkgo — a fan, and yellow: a bright point on the water.
- Daisy — a white flower, not a leaf. Round, so it stands out among the long ones.
- Willow — long and narrow. The longest of the ten, and it lies along the current.
- Camellia — a red petal. Deep colour reads well on water.
- Clover — three small round lobes.
- Oak — a big leaf with a wavy edge. It looks substantial.
- Cherry — a pale pink petal, smaller and lighter than the camellia.
- Nibbled — a leaf something has eaten the edge of. The gap is the marker.
- Birch — a small oval. Plain, and perhaps the most leaf-like leaf of the lot.
Why ten
Because ten is the most people who can play. There is no eleventh leaf, so for a bigger group the practical route is to settle groups first and then run a race inside one.
They are handed out from the top of the list: maple, then ginkgo, then a white flower. Nothing similar follows itself, so two names typed next to each other rarely get mixed up.
The nibbled one
One of the ten has had its edge eaten by something. That is mostly what a real river carries; a stream of ten immaculate leaves would be the strange sight.
The missing piece does not slow it down, in case you were wondering.
The petals
Cherry, camellia and daisy are not leaves. Ten actual leaves would put nothing but green and brown on the water, so three of the ten are red, pink and white instead — and those three carry furthest.
And there is no particular rule that what you drop off a bridge has to be a leaf.
Keeping track of your own
Before the start, learn the shape of your leaf. Shape beats colour: when the camera pulls back the colour shrinks to a speck, but the outline survives.
Willow and oak are large, clover and birch are small, so size helps in the wide shots. And if you lose it anyway, wait — the names come back with the ranking at the finish.
Why no name tags
Nothing labelled floats on this river. Which leaf is whose is a matter of shape and colour; names and places arrive on the result screen once the race is over.
After a race or two you notice that no tags is the easier way to watch: a shape registers faster than a word. A child too young to read manages exactly as well.