The game is played with piles of beans. Each player, when it is their turn to play, can remove beans from just one pile, but as many as they want, from a minimum of one to a maximum of the entire pile. The player who removes the last bean wins.

Another implementation of the same game uses, instead of each pile of beans, a stem with several segments of a bush so that, when a segment is cut, that segment falls and all the others that lose connection to the ground. This version allows the use of chalk and an eraser.

For example, the position corresponding to stacks of 1, 3, 5, 6, 2 will look like this