ABSTRACT
In less than a year after its introduction, around Easter 1936, nearly 3,000,000 sets of Pick Up Sticks had been sold. A deceptively simple game, there were 41 seven-inch sticks painted yellow, red, green, blue, and black packed in a canister with a set of rules. The first player held all the sticks in his or her fist perpendicular to the surface of a table or rug, then released them. The sticks fell and intertwined forming a haystack from which the player had to pick up one stick at a time without disturbing the others. Each color was worth a different amount of points; the lone black stick counted the most. As soon as the first player either made a false move or picked up all the sticks cleanly, the next player released a fistful and so on.
