Experiencing an Ancient Mid-Autumn Festival Tradition

October means Mid-Autumn festival (and mooncakes)!

This year, a group of our residence hall students decided to introduce us to an ancient Mid-Autumn Festival game from Fujian province...

The basic action of the game is quite simple: players take turns tossing six die into a bowl...

...and, depending on the outcome, prizes are awarded. Once all the prizes are distributed, the game concludes. (Determining the outcome for a roll is where things get a little complicated, so I won't dig into that here, but you can read more about it if you are curious.)

Mooncakes are the usual prize, but the students would have had to buy nearly 200 mooncakes to support the size of the activity, so that would have been far too pricey. Instead, they used individually-wrapped snack food items of various values, and that was definitely good enough. After all, the prizes didn't really matter, it was just a great opportunity to participate in an ancient tradition and spend quality time with members of our community.