The sights of students frantically running around and tagging each other with plastic spoons may seem bizarre to outsiders, but to RM’s junior class, it can only mean one thing: Spoon Assassin is back.

This long-standing tradition, similar to Senior Assassin, but played with spoons, was looked forward to by IB students from all grades for years. But when COVID-19 hit, the tradition faltered, and was never brought back afterwards. That changed in May of 2024, when now-junior Ganesh Ramamurthi had an idea to revitalize it at the end of his freshman year. He got the idea from his older sister, who had participated in the game during her time in the IB program.

In Spoon Assassin, each player is given a plastic spoon with their target’s name on it, and they must tag that target on their left shoulder to eliminate them. Each elimination gives players a new target, creating a chain that ends when one player remains.

Players cannot tag and eliminate other players during class, but almost all other times of day are fair game. Most cycles of the game last around two to four weeks, depending on how competitive players are and if rules change. The most recent game cycle from October 2025 lasted 14 days, starting Oct. 7 and having one player left on Oct. 21.

To avoid the chance of elimination, players participate in daily “safeties” which provide them immunity for the day. These can vary in requirements, from wearing a certain item of clothing to completing a scavenger hunt in the hallways. Though they start easy, they get harder and more embarrassing as the game progresses in order to speed up eliminations. “For one safety, we had to tape as many pens as we could to ourselves. I had around 30 pens taped to my jacket and I wore them in the hallways. It looked really ridiculous,” junior Oliver Lin said.

Since the game’s revitalization, the first safety has always been to wear sunglasses, which seems deceptively simple but always manages to eliminate a few people. In the most recent cycle, five students got eliminated from not participating in this safety. Some students have also tested the boundaries of what qualifies for a safety. “In one of the Spoon Assassins this year, I forgot to bring my sunglasses to school. So, during first period, I cut sunglasses out of a piece of paper and taped them to my face for the entire day. That has to be the most creative thing I’ve done to stay safe,” junior Obi Schneider said.

Harder safeties have included wearing a suit to school, completing a scavenger hunt in the English hallway and wearing winter clothing during the summer. If a player ever slips up and accidently stops participating in the safety, they are vulnerable to being tagged. Some safeties intentionally encourage students to support their school community, such as requiring attendance at RM Black Maskers’ drama productions.

On “Purge Days,” no safety is provided, bringing the game into complete chaos where all players are on-edge. Players are more focused on avoiding elimination than their schoolwork. “I think Purge Days are necessary because there are competitive people that will somehow always do the safety, no matter how embarrassing it is,” Lin said. These days often result in more eliminations, speeding up the game and making it more exciting.

Some IB students explained that freshman year can be especially socially difficult, since these students often leave many of their middle school friends to join a new cohort of students from across Montgomery County. “In freshman year, I definitely noticed that many IB students were shy about making new friends. Personally, it took me a while to find a good group of friends,” junior Giacomo Galdzicki said. Players said that Spoon Assassin can bridge this social gap by giving students a reason to socialize outside of class. “I thought that there wasn’t really that much community building among our cohort during my first year at RM, so I just thought it’d be a nice thing to do to get to start talking to each other and get people to know each other,” Ramamurthi said. The game’s Discord server, originally meant for game rules and status updates, now stays active year-round with messages about schoolwork, events and memes.

The game has also transformed from a once IB-exclusive tradition to one open to all students. “I think that Spoon Assassin forges a bond between students that you can’t typically get between class time and extracurriculars,” Schneider said. “I became friends with a lot more people, both IB and non-IB, whom I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t participated in the game.”

Following the tradition of Spoon Assassin pre-COVID, the winner of each spoon game gets the opportunity to help run the next one as the “Game Master.” Even without cash prizes, like Senior Assassin has, this incentive still brings a lot of competition. Ramamurthi ran the first game, and the most recent winner of the game from the first quarter of the 2025-2026 school year was junior Ada Ingram, who has been working with Ramamurthi to ensure the game runs smoothly. “It’s kind of like a rite of passage,” she said. “I think it’s important to carry on this tradition because people really have fun with it. It’s such a privilege to be working with Ganesh and doing this for our community.”

Previous winners also echo this sentiment. “For me, running the game means that I get to spend more time with my friends and watch them have fun,” Schneider said. “I think that passing the game on to the winner each time deepens the sense of connection between Game Master and player, between friend and friend. This way, more people get to share the experience of both playing and then running the game.”

Behind the scenes, the responsibilities involved in organizing Spoon Assassin are surprisingly demanding. As Ingram explained, Game Masters must first choose who has each other’s spoons. Then, throughout the game, they must track eliminations, deal with rule discrepancies and update the Discord server with rules and player statuses. The rules permit the Game Master final authority, allowing them to quickly manage any disputes that may occur. For example, when RM students took the PSAT on Oct. 13, some students were unclear whether they could tag their classmates out during the official College Board exam or during its breaks, with one player asking in the Discord server, “Is the break in between PSAT sections considered class time?” Another time, when a safety required players to bring a toy to school, junior G Connolly, Game Master at the time, swiftly followed up with a server-wide announcement, “Upon further consideration please do not bring in [toy] guns to school.”

Conflicts also occur due to misunderstandings of safety rules and what counts as valid elimination. “Whenever there’s a dispute about the rules, I call both people from both sides of the dispute and hear what they each have to say,” Ingram said. “Me and Ganesh take into account both perspectives and then say what we think is best. The process usually takes around an hour. But ultimately, as the Game Master, my word is law, so they have to listen to what I say.”

One of the most important responsibilities for Game Masters is picking daily safeties each night. Often, they will brainstorm and choose never-seen-before safeties to keep players on their toes and to keep the game fresh and unexpected. “Some of my personal favorite safeties are the ones that make you think strategically,” Schneider said. “When I was running the game, one of the safeties I set up required players to coordinate to not wear the same color shirt in order to stay safe. On one hand, players needed to work together to stay safe, but they could also sabotage each other and risk both of their eliminations.”

Apart from socialization, another reason Ramamurthi revitalized Spoon Assassin was to reduce the stress that IB can induce on students. “I wanted to join Spoon Assassin this round because I have felt like the work that we’ve been doing, especially as juniors in IB, has been too much and has distracted me from interacting with my classmates. The game has definitely helped with this stress,” Galdzicki said. RM’s IB program is one of the most rigorous in the county, with many students taking the hardest Honors, AP and IB courses available to them. Galdzicki says that many of his IB peers are constantly focused on their heavy course load with no time for stress-relief or fun with friends, especially during the school day.

More competitive players, especially later in the game, form alliances with other players and employ strategies to protect themselves. “Typically, I will go up to a group of people I’m friends with and hopefully find someone to team up with,” Schneider said. “Sometimes, I will go up to the person who I think has me, or the person who I have on my spoon. If I don’t want them to get eliminated, I will try and work with them to get others eliminated together.”

Many students can be seen in the school day running, ducking and hiding from each other, especially on purge days. “Sometimes people take it a little bit too seriously, and so we have to remind them that it’s just a game,” Ramamurthi said. “But I think a lot of people get really into it, which is really cool, and it’s fun to see how far people are willing to go to be safe.”