Fruit Basket Turnover

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This article is about the game. For the manga and anime series, see Fruits Basket.

Fruit Basket Turnover is a children's game also known as Fruits Basket in Japan.

Fruit Basket usually refers to a variation in which each fruit is associated with only one player, and the player in the centre must call two fruit names.

1 Rules
2 Party game variant
3 References to the game
4 See also

[edit] Rules

The game is played as follows:

The players are divided into equal-sized groups, with each group having the name of a fruit.

A circle is formed with a number of chairs equal to one less than the number of players. The players sit on the chairs, ensuring that members of each group are evenly distributed around the circle.

One player will be left without a chair, and will stand in the centre of the circle.

The player standing in the centre calls out one of the fruit names. When this happens, all players in that group must stand up from their seats and move to another seat in the circle. The player in the centre must attempt to take one of the free seats while the other players are moving.

A new player will then be left in the centre, enabling the game to be repeated. If any player failed to move even though their group's fruit name was called, they are required to move into the centre and the player previously in the centre sits in their seat.

Instead of stating a fruit name, the player in the centre may call "Fruit Basket Turnover!" or "Fruits Basket!", in which case everybody must move to a different seat.

There is often a restriction that the player must move to a seat not adjacent to their own

In some variants of the game, a player can be eliminated from the game, usually if they either fail to move when their fruit name is called, or are due to appear in the centre for two rounds in a row. Whenever a player is eliminated, a chair is also removed from the circle. The game bears some semblance to the game Musical Chairs.

[edit] Party game variant

A variation of the game, played by older children and young adults, does not make use of fruit names. Instead, the player in the centre calls out the description of a group of people (for example, "women", "people who have been to Kansai", etc.) and all people in that group are required to move. The only limit on this is that the person in the centre must be a member of the specified group (e.g., only a woman may call on "women" to move).

[edit] References to the game

The most well-known reference to Fruits Basket is the anime and manga series of the same name, where it is used as a metaphor for ability to integrate with a social group. In that series, the protagonist Tohru Honda describes that whenever she played the game in school, she was assigned the name "onigiri" (rice ball). Although she was fine with this, she later realised that the other children playing had agreed to never call this name (because an onigiri is not a fruit), thus leaving her with nothing to do in the game.

In fact, she should have immediately noticed that something was wrong, because she was the only child given the name onigiri, which would be illegal by the rules and create an unplayable situation. If she had been called, she would automatically lose her seat, but this can be put down to artistic license, and the fact that Tohru's not too bright.