If you are reading this, there is a decent chance you got here by searching for a game you half-remember and could not name. It went something like: you and a friend clap twice, then both throw a move on the third beat. You could charge up, or spend what you had saved on something bigger. Get caught hesitating and you lost immediately.
We played this on the school bus, at canteen, and sometimes in class.
The rules lived in hands and memories. There was no rulebook, no app, and almost certainly no single correct version.
The one part everyone agrees on
Across every version anyone has described, three things hold:
- Two claps, then a simultaneous action on the third beat.
- An action that builds a resource, and attacks that spend it.
- A defence that saves you from some attacks but not others — so there is never a safe answer.
That is a remarkably complete game for something transmitted entirely by word of mouth. Nobody designed it, yet it was designed by everybody. It had a life of its own, where anyone who played it probably contributed to its rules at some point.
The moves people remember
In 2023 I asked r/askSingapore whether anyone else remembered this game. People did. Their versions were wonderfully different from mine and from each other's.
CS
The version I grew up with, and the most commonly described: you charge up and spend it on escalating weapons. Guns as the cheap shot, grenades in the middle, machine guns above that. Defences were some combination of blocking and getting out of the way.
Street Fighter
Hadouken! Sonic boom! Same game, entirely different fiction over the top.
The pocket one (don't sue me)
Earthquake, psychic, dig, fly, reflect. We basically loved skinning everything back then already, eh?
Why the variation is the point
The game survived precisely because it had no authority to defer to. Every school, friend group and generation got to fork it, and the forks that played well spread.
The version you played was probably a reflection of what all the rage was at that time.
What it was called
I knew it as Charge, but what about you?
Whether it had other names elsewhere is genuinely an open question. It shares obvious DNA with hand games played across Southeast Asia and beyond, and I would not be surprised if near-identical versions exist under names I have never heard.
Is your version missing?
It probably is. This page is short because the record is thin, and the only way it gets better is if people who remember differently say so.
If you played a version with moves not listed here, or different costs, or a rule that settled arguments in your playground — I would genuinely like to hear it. There is a feedback option inside the game, or you can add to the original thread.
The long-term hope is that players can reconstruct the variants they remember and play them, rather than reading someone else's version of their own childhood.
Play the version that exists so far
The playable ruleset is called Counter S — guns, grenades, machine guns, an airstrike, and two defences that each cover half the list. It is one interpretation of these memories, not the definitive one.
Or read the full rules first.