To bond with their classmates in the last few months of their senior year, the seniors of 2024 held a grade-wide competition involving pretending to “kill” one another with water guns.

Popular on Instagram, the game is called “Senior Assassin” and involves players eliminating a series of assigned targets by successfully shooting them with a water gun. It starts by assigning each player or two-person team a target person to be their victim. 

Once a team or player gets through one round, it is assigned a new team of players to eliminate.

All players are also targets, and targets have a defense: if holding or wearing a visible toy baby – called a “baby doll” – when sprayed with the water gun, the “kill” is not valid. Even if they get hit by water, it doesn’t count. 

“Senior Assassin is a Hunger Games-like game,” said senior Yosef Harkham, who moderated the game. “You have week-long rounds where you can be killed at any place at any time unless you’re carrying a baby doll. That baby doll creates a ‘forcefield’ around you.”

To play, every senior paid five dollars to be combined for a final cash prize of $210. Yosef said that out of around 70 students in the grade, 42 participated.

Since there was still no winner when the seniors left for the annual Poland-Israel trip this week, the eight remaining players voted to end it and split the $210 prize.

Kira Kupferman had the idea to bring the game to Shalhevet. 

“It was a senior thing that everybody was doing,” Kira said. “There wasn’t one school that wasn’t doing it so I was like, ‘We gotta get our school to do it.’”

She said it was ended early because the remaining players did not want to be “killing” each other in actual concentration camps. 

They also felt that the game would be going on too long if continued until they returned, she said.

Under Shalhevet’s rules, to which Yosef contributed, exclusion zones – where a person could not be “killed” – were on the school campus, on Fairfax Avenue near school, in the senior parking lot, or at a party or school-sponsored event.

“Killing” was also not allowed on Shabbat, and the game was paused for Saracheck, Color War, and Pesach. 

Among the rules Yosef set were that people’s locations had to be set constantly to “on” so people could find their targets. And he required that when one person was attacking a target, another had to video it to verify that the kill was good.

Once verified, it was sent to senior Ariel Moheban, who posted the video on the Senior Assassin Instagram.

Caroline Kboudi said it was ironic that her grade had to “kill” each other in order to feel closer.

“Even though it’s killing each other, the game brought us together because it forced us to go and see each other and be near each other,” Caroline said in an interview May 6.

After each week-long round, there was a “Purge Day,” when baby dolls did not serve as protection. 

On Purge days, many seniors took extra precautions to not be hit. According to Kira, Elishai Khoobian left his phone home the whole night of Purge Day so he wouldn’t get hit.  

“Ezra Helfand slept at school for that morning because he was scared he was going to get shot,” she said.

Seniors said that the game created a fun paranoia among classmates.

“On the first night, I made my dad circle the block before we went inside because I didn’t have my baby and I was scared that someone was hiding there,” said senior Keira Deutsch.

Keira was very upset when she lost in the first round.

“I was so mad because I was like, should I bring my baby, should I not,” Keira said. “And  I didn’t and then I got out. And it was so early into the game so it was just really annoying.”

Although people were upset when they lost, seniors agreed that the game brought their class closer together before they graduate.

“It’s that time of the year when things are winding down, and we want to spend as much time with each other however we can in the very limited time that we have left,” said Yosef. “It’s in the same spirit as Senior Ditch Day and Senior Prank, in the camaraderie spirit that we only have so much time left.”

The winning seniors who split the prize were Tali Liebenthal and Ezra Helfand (playing as a team), Caroline Kboudi and Sami Brous-Light (a team), Aviva Cohen and Jacob Kilberg (a team), Eliana Weinberg (solo), and Elishai Khoobian (solo).

They said staying in had required a lot of strategy.

“I bring my baby everywhere even if I am just walking from my car to my house and my house to my car,” said Caroline. “A lot of people have gotten out by being shot when walking to or from their car.”

At least some of the class is hoping that Senior Assassin is not entirely over yet.

“Hopefully the grades in the future will do it too,” said Ariel Moheban.