Bahasa Melayu
Halaman ini ada dalam Bahasa Melayu
Seluruh halaman — arahan, butang dan keputusan.
Tukar ke Bahasa MelayuBahasa Indonesia
Halaman ini tersedia dalam Bahasa Indonesia
Seluruh halaman — petunjuk, tombol, dan hasil.
Beralih ke Bahasa IndonesiaEight real-world scenarios drawn from the 144 worked examples published across the 36 Stratagems. Read what happened and name the move — the three wrong answers always come from the same set of six, so elimination will not save you. Free, runs entirely in your browser.
Stratagem Scenario Quiz
Eight scenarios, drawn from the 144 worked examples published across the 36 Stratagems. Read what happened and name the move. The three wrong answers always come from the same set of six, so you cannot get there by elimination.
How to play
Read the scenario
A short worked example, published on one of the 36 stratagem pages. It never names the stratagem — that has been checked across all 144.
Pick from four
All four options belong to the same set of six, so they share a strategic situation and differ in the move.
See why
Each answer reveals the scenario's own one-line lesson and links to the full stratagem page.
Share the squares
The result is squares only — it gives away no scenario and no answer, so it spoils nothing for the next reader.
Where the scenarios come from
The 144 scenarios are invented illustrations, not reports of real events, and they are published as such on the stratagem pages. They exist to show a move working in a setting a reader recognises — a supplier negotiation, a security team, a hiring round — rather than a battlefield two thousand years old.
The quiz is deterministic: a seed decides which scenarios appear and in what order the options sit, so the same link replays the same round. Nothing is generated at the moment you press a key, and no answer of yours is uploaded.
Quick facts
There are 144 scenarios, spread evenly across all 36 stratagems — between three and six each.
The three wrong answers always come from the same set of six, so elimination on theme does not work.
No scenario names its own answer. That was checked across all 144 against each stratagem's characters, traditional form, English name and pinyin.
The scenario's title is withheld until you answer: a title like “The gate left open” is most of the answer.
Every round is deterministic — a seed decides the scenarios and the option order, so the same link replays the same round.
The scenarios are invented illustrations, not reports of real events, and say so on the stratagem pages they come from.
Settings are modern on purpose — security teams, hiring rounds, supplier talks — not battlefields two thousand years old.
The result is squares only. It reveals no scenario and no answer, so sharing it spoils nothing.
Nothing runs on a server. The round is built in your browser and no answer of yours is uploaded.
The six sets — winning, enemy, attack, chaos, proximate, desperate — each hold exactly six, which is what makes four same-set options possible.
Questions
- No. They are invented illustrations, written to show a move working in a setting a reader recognises, and the stratagem pages they come from label them as such. The historical episodes behind each stratagem are separate, and are covered on those pages.
- Because drawing them at random from all 36 turns the quiz into a vocabulary test — the other options are usually so unrelated that elimination answers it. Same-set options share a strategic situation and differ in the move, which is the distinction worth learning.
- It should not, and that is checked rather than assumed: across all 144 scenarios, the body and lesson contain zero occurrences of the stratagem’s simplified characters, traditional form, English name or pinyin. The check runs on every build, so a new scenario that leaks fails it.
- Yes. A seed decides which scenarios appear and where each option sits, so the same link replays the same round exactly. Nothing is randomised at the moment you press a key.
- No. Every scenario was written and published before this quiz existed, and the round is assembled by a tested module running in your browser. There is no model call anywhere in this tool.
- Green is a scenario you named correctly, white is one you did not. Deliberately nothing else — the grid carries no scenario, no answer and no stratagem, so posting it cannot spoil the round for anyone.
- Every revealed answer links to that stratagem’s own page, which carries the origin story, the explanation, how it applies today, and the chapters of the Art of War it sits under.
- Eight scenarios. Short enough to finish in a couple of minutes, and long enough that a lucky guess does not decide the result — with four options, guessing every answer averages two right.
- Yes — all 36, with between three and six scenarios each. No stratagem is unreachable as a question, and a test asserts that rather than trusting it.
- Five, throughout: English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia — the scenarios themselves, not just the buttons. Four scenario-language pairs are held back because the Chinese text names its own stratagem outright, which would hand you the answer; they still appear on the stratagem pages, where naming it is no giveaway.
Method & sources
How it computes
Shows one of 144 original 'in practice' scenarios — between three and six for each of the 36 stratagems — and asks which stratagem it illustrates. A round is eight questions with four options each; the three wrong options are always drawn from the same set of six as the answer, so elimination cannot solve it. Rounds are generated from a seed, so a shared link replays the same quiz. The scenarios are fictional RECATOOLS writing and name no real person or organisation.
What this tool implements
- Distractors come from the correct stratagem's own set of six (勝戰計 … 敗戰計), never from all 36 — the quiz tests telling apart six moves that share a situation, not vocabulary.
- Rounds are reproducible from their seed: a xorshift32 generator (Marsaglia, 2003) and a Fisher–Yates shuffle, with no unseeded randomness.
- Six sets of six in the received order — 勝戰計, 敵戰計, 攻戰計, 混戰計, 並戰計, 敗戰計 — with the stratagems numbered 1 (瞞天過海) to 36 (走為上) as in the 1941 printing.
- Translations are RECATOOLS' own. The four-character stratagem names have no single standard English rendering — von Senger (1991) and Verstappen (1999) differ on most of them — so the Chinese in both scripts, the pinyin and a literal gloss sit beside every English name for checking.
- Scenarios are fiction. No real person, company or government is presented as an example of a deceptive stratagem.
Sources
- 三十六計 (Thirty-Six Stratagems): anonymous. The received text is the booklet printed in Chengdu in 1941 from an undated manuscript bought at a bookstall in Binzhou (邠州, now 彬州, Shaanxi) — thirty-six four-character stratagems in six sets of six, with glosses drawn from the 易經.
- 蕭子顯《南齊書》卷二十六〈王敬則傳〉(c. 537) — the earliest attestation of the phrase 檀公三十六策，走是上計 — 中華書局點校本, 1972; text: https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&chapter=245404
- von Senger H. The Book of Stratagems: Tactics for Triumph and Survival. Gubitz MB, trans. New York: Viking; 1991. ISBN 0-670-83962-0.
- Verstappen SH. The Thirty-six Strategies of Ancient China. San Francisco: China Books & Periodicals; 1999. ISBN 0-8351-2642-0.
- Marsaglia G. Xorshift RNGs. Journal of Statistical Software 2003;8(14). https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v008i14
What can make this go out of date
- None at runtime.
Pick up where you left off
Stored only in this browser — never sent to our servers.