It involves setting up a couple of chairs and two mirrors in a particular way and taking steps to put yourself in the right frame of mind for the experience. Instead, it’s probably best described as a meditative ritual. It’s more involved, for one thing also, the reason I like it is that it doesn’t say specifically that its goal is to summon any spirits or demons (because as much as I might want to believe in ghosts and other worldly beings, I don’t - I’ve just never experienced enough proof from a first hand perspective). I mean, sure, we’d all heard of Bloody Mary and what have you this one, though? This one is… special. I would argue that these days, Three Kings is the mirror game to end all mirror games ever since its appearance on the r/NoSleep subreddit four years ago and the subsequent creation of r/ThreeKings, mirror games have been de rigueur for digital natives in a way that I don’t think they really were previously.

We worry that, if we break a mirror, we’ll be cursed with seven years of bad luck.Īnd we like to play games with them, largely, I think, because we have a deep-seated psychological need to tempt fate. We wonder if mirrors might actually be more like windows, or perhaps even doors, and if so, what they might let in (or out) - and whether we should cover them up in order to keep them closed. We’re fascinated by our reflections, and whether or not an exterior image might accurately show what a person is like inside - or not. Mirrors have long been associated with the otherworldly in superstition, folklore, and literature. To be fair, many of them are recent inventions, stories spun in order to shock and delight in the same way the urban legends we told each other as children were in that sense, they’re not steeped in lore or grounded in reality.

Many of us grew up shutting ourselves in the bathroom with the lights off during sleepovers and chanting the name “Bloody Mary” into the mirror 13 times - but there’s a whole host of creepy mirror games out there that our pre-adolescent selves never even dreamed might exist.

Scary games to play in real life