FLAMES is the schoolyard name game played across India and South Asia: cross out the letters two names share, count whatever is left around the word F-L-A-M-E-S, and see which letter survives. Friends, Love, Affection, Marriage, Enemies or Siblings. This calculator plays it by the written rules and shows the entire count, so you can check the game was played honestly.
Type one name in each field. Keep each field to a single alphabet — Latin, Cyrillic or Devanagari — though the two fields may differ.
Letters appearing in both names are cancelled against each other, and whatever remains in each name is added together into one number.
That total is the step size. The breakdown shows it alongside the letters left standing on each side of the pair.
The result names the surviving letter and lists the elimination order, so the whole count can be replayed by hand on paper.
FLAMES is an acronym, and each letter is one possible verdict on a pair of names. F is Friends, L is Love, A is Affection, M is Marriage, E is Enemies, and S — the one people most often forget — is Siblings. Siblings is not a mistake or a joke option: it is part of the game as it has always been played, and it covers the easy, family-like closeness that is neither romance nor rivalry.
You will meet small variations in the wording elsewhere. Some versions say Friendship rather than Friends, Enmity rather than Enemies, or Lovers rather than Love. Those are the same six outcomes under different labels, and no version is more official than another, because FLAMES has no owner and no rulebook — it spread through school notebooks, not through a publisher.
This page uses the most common English wording and keeps the six meanings in the traditional order the acronym spells out.
FLAMES is a counting-out game, and the only way to play it wrongly is to be vague about the rules, so here they are in full. Both names are normalised first — spacing, capitals, apostrophes and accents inside Latin names are all levelled — and then only letters are counted: spaces and hyphens take no part, so a two-word name gets no advantage from its formatting. Letters are cancelled as multisets.
If one name has two letter A's and the other has three, two cancel and one remains; this is what stops a repeated letter from wiping out more than it should. Whatever is left in the first name and whatever is left in the second are added into a single number, and that number is the step. Starting from F, every step-th letter is struck from the list F, L, A, M, E, S, the count continuing from the letter after the one just removed and wrapping around the end, until a single letter is left standing.
One case needs its own rule: when the two names are built from exactly the same letters, nothing remains, the step is zero, and a count with a step of zero cannot be run at all. That result is fixed as Friends, the elimination order is empty, and the breakdown says so plainly.
Friends, Love, Affection, Marriage, Enemies and Siblings — in that order, which is the order the letters spell. The S catches most people out: it means Siblings, the easy family-like closeness, and it is a genuine part of the game rather than a filler letter. Other versions write Friendship, Enmity or Lovers instead; the six outcomes are the same.
Write both names out and strike each letter they share, one for one. Count every letter still standing in both names — that total is your step. Then count around F-L-A-M-E-S, removing every step-th letter, carrying on from the letter after the one you removed and wrapping around the end, until one letter is left.
It is a letter game, and it was a letter game in the playground too. It tells you something about how two names are spelled and nothing whatsoever about the people carrying them. What this page can promise is that the count itself is done correctly and shown in full, so you can see the game was played properly rather than fudged.
No, and any calculator that shows one has bolted it on. FLAMES produces one of six words, not a score out of 100 — the count ends when a single letter is left, and there is no number to read off it. If a percentage is what you are after, the love calculator linked below works that way and publishes its formula.
Because every letter cancels, nothing is left over, and the step becomes zero. A counting game with a step of zero has nowhere to move. Rather than invent a rule or show an error, the result is fixed as Friends and the breakdown flags that both names use the same letters, so you can see it was that case and not an ordinary count.
Not to the outcome. The surviving letter, the step size and the elimination order come out the same either way. Only the two per-name leftovers swap places in the breakdown, which is correct — each one describes a specific name, and pretending otherwise would make the breakdown wrong.
No. Everything is worked out inside your browser. The names are not written to the address bar, not kept on your device and not sent anywhere, because there is nothing to send them to. A shared result card holds the names inside the image only, and you decide who receives it.