Human knot

A human knot is a common icebreaker game or team building activity for new people to learn to work together in physical proximity.

The knot is a disentanglement puzzle in which a group of people in a circle each hold hands with two people who are not next to them, and the goal is to disentangle the limbs to get the group into a circle, without letting go of grasped hands.

[1] An easy way to ensure that the game will end up with a single circle with no nodes is to start from a circle of people holding each other hand, looking all towards the center of the circle, and ask some of them to cross their arms and swap their left hand with their right hand grasping again the same neighbor; this corresponds to a Reidemeister move and thus preserves the solvability of the knot.

When the game is successfully completed a certain number of people will appear to be outside of the circle.

To increase the difficulty level, players can be blindfolded or required that the game be played silently (no talking).