How to play shadow boxing.
It goes by a lot of names: shadow boxing, the ish game, the pointing game. The Seahawks made it their whole locker room in 2026. It is older than that, and the bottom of this page says exactly how much older.
The rules, in five lines
- Two people. One is the pointer, one is the looker.
- You both move at the same time. The pointer points up, down, left or right. The looker turns their head one of those four ways.
- Same direction? The looker got caught. That is one strike.
- Caught three times in a row and the looker loses the match.
- Dodge, and the chain resets to zero and the roles flip. Now you are pointing.
The chain is the part people get wrong
A catch does not just add a strike. It adds a step to a sequence the pointer has to replay before they are allowed to throw a new one.
The lick man
That is the name the Seahawks give whoever keeps losing. It is not a trophy. It is the entire reason the game gets loud, and it is why this site is called what it is called.
Two rules that are ours, not theirs
In a locker room you can trust two people to move at the same time. On a screen you cannot, so we added exactly two things and we are labelling them as our addition rather than passing them off as the real game.
- The beat. Three counts, then a short window where a commit counts. That is what makes simultaneous enforceable instead of trusted.
- The whiff. Do not commit inside the window and you lose the beat. Two whiffs in a row counts as a catch, so waiting out the clock is not a strategy.
- Replay beats cannot catch you. While the pointer walks back through the chain you already know what is coming, so those beats set the rhythm and the last one is the live one.
How to actually get good
- Stop avoiding repeats. Almost nobody picks the same direction twice running, and a decent opponent knows it. The direction you just used is the safest one on the board.
- Your eyes go first. A head follows a glance. Good players are reading your eyes, not your neck.
- Watch what you do at two strikes. Everybody has a panic direction, and it is different from their calm one. Ours tracks yours separately, which is why tier five gets you on the third.
- The replay is the skill test. Knowing what is coming and still being in rhythm for the live beat is the whole game.
Where the game actually came from
Short version: it is Japanese, it is decades old, and TikTok did not invent it.
- Japan, at least the 1990s. It is called Acchi Muite Hoi (あっち向いてホイ, roughly "look over there!"), and it traditionally settles who won a round of rock paper scissors. It turns up as a boss minigame in Super Mario RPG in 1996, and Data East shipped an arcade game named after it the same year.
- Pacific Islander communities, the 2000s. Where a lot of people outside Japan first met it, with clips online from the middle of the decade.
- TikTok and Twitter, 2019. The viral wave that gave it the names shadow boxing and the ish game.
- The Seahawks, 2026. Mike Macdonald had the team competing at things, shadow boxing won, and it became the thing the locker room ran on. Running backs against defensive linemen, corners against the offensive line, which is exactly why it did the team any good.
We did not invent this game. Japan did, a long time ago, and a lot of people kept it alive before it ever got a hashtag. We built a way to play it with no webcam and nobody else in the room, and we wrote the rules down properly. That is all this is.