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String games (cat's cradle)

The game and its history — explore its living tradition country by country.

The oldest recorded folk game — string figures were documented across Indigenous cultures before any contact between them: Inuit, Navajo, Maori, Yoruba, Torres Strait Islander, Polynesian, Andean, Sami. The English 'cat's cradle' sequence is one of thousands of documented figures. Anthropologists collected 800+ named string figures worldwide. It requires nothing but a loop of string and hands.

Explore this game by country

Each country page describes how this game and its variants are played there — its own name, its own board, its own rules.

worldwide — Indigenous and folk cultures everywhere
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