Gotcha is a game of elimination where players tag one another and try to keep from being tagged themselves. The winner is the player with the most “tags.” This year’s winner was Rika Ichinose (I) who won with 30 tags. The game is launched during the shoulder week between sports seasons, and every student from Class IV to Class I is on the playing roster. Some students really take to the live action game and play to win. Whether you’re an avid player or someone relieved to be tagged early, most everyone likes to follow the action and watch how the tags play out.
The ace Gotcha player knows the rules and finds his or her targets without breaking any rule. That’s not as easy as it may seem. Rules evolve, over the years, and become a bit intricate. Students have been playing Gotcha in the Milton hallways and campus byways for at least 10 years, so some rules keep mayhem from occurring during class breaks; some keep the innocent bystander safe from an inadvertent tackle; and some just keep the game complicated.
Last year’s head monitors Caroline Wall ’15 and Louis Demetroulakos ’15 made this video to introduce the game and put the rules on the table. Adding speed to the game is the Gotcha website, designed this year by Jacob Aronoff (I). Players simply log in to post a tag and find out the name of his or her next target. In the “old days” someone who just made a tag would have to wait for that impossibly slow process, email, to figure out who to target next. Students also checked the new site to compare how different classes were doing against each other, and to see how rapidly the number of players “still in the game” was dropping—real time stats that were featured on the site.