Jon Allen’s Pain Game Story

The magician puts a real, sharp six-inch nail in a paper bag and mixes the bags. They then slam their hand on the bags one at a time, following the audience's instructions, until one bag is left. It is the bag with the spike.

If you've ever seen a magician perform this routine, it's very likely that you were looking at The Pain Game by Jon Allen.

This magic product is exceptional for many reasons. It's been around for nearly twenty years and consistently sells out when available. Every unit is precision-engineered, and — this is what's most surprising to us — has always outperformed its copycats.

If we set aside classic props such as the Invisible Deck, very few magic products survive the test of time this way. The closest example is probably Double Cross by Mark Southworth.

At One Ahead, we've been reporting on the magic industry and its changes: the impact of tariffs, secret magic products, and the changing economy.

Jon Allen is a precursor to the independent creator era we live in. He has hand-crafted and published dozens of successful magic products for over twenty years. The Pain Game, as you'll see, is probably the most successful high-priced item in the industry.

Jon Allen knows what works.

We decided to speak with him about The Pain Game, copycats, and the evolving magic market.

Jon Allen came up with The Pain Game in 2005. He showed the routine to Andi Gladwin at a restaurant and, shortly after, presented the trick at The Session convention. He discovered an original method that gave the performer much more freedom and checked the safety box for the routine.

The Pain Game is a Russian Roulette trick. The biggest issue with this plot is safety: magicians often use genuine sharp items, i.e., nails and knives, and rely on secret markings or indicators to track where the nail is.

Needless to say, this method is not necessarily safe. Just because you know where the sharp object is doesn't mean you won't accidentally slam your hand on it or mistakenly believe it’s somewhere else.

It's so easy to find online videos of Russian Roulette routines gone wrong.

David Blaine injured himself doing it, as has Derren Brown.

Allen was well aware of the problem:

"I didn't decide to come up with a Russian Roulette; I wanted to solve a problem. There's a YouTube video of a lot of good magicians slamming their hand down on a sharp object — you'll have seen it, many people will have seen it. These are really knowledgeable, good magicians, and yet they all manage to screw it up, or impale their hand. Why are they messing up this trick? It comes down to one thing: the reason they're all slamming their hand down on the sharp object is because there's a sharp object sticking up, ready for their hand to land on. So that was my starting point: how can I make it safe?"

He tested several ideas. One was not having the nail in the bag at all, and introducing it at the end. That didn't work.

Interestingly, as you'll see, Allen never considered using something that looked sharp but wasn't. To make the routine realistic, he wanted the nail to be sharp and solid.

It was by looking at the nail's shape that he realised what the method could be. He went to a precision engineer, got a prototype, and it worked.

We can't, of course, reveal the method here. But what we can say is that the nail is really in the bag, made of solid steel, and sharp, and the performer is fully in control of which bag will end up holding the nail.

That's one of the great features of The Pain Game: the audience makes all the choices. As Allen explained to me,

"With Russian Roulettes, it was always the performer who decided which bag or cup the hand would slam down on. There was always this thing of - the audience doesn't know how you know, but you must know. With The Pain Game, this was the first one where it wasn't the performer making the decision. Anyone could mix up the bags, nobody knows where the nail is, and I could let the spectator make the decisions."

This opened the door to more presentational approaches and much more freedom for the performer.

As of 2026, Allen has released a 2.0 version of the trick with one major improvement. At the start of the trick, the performer can give the nail and the block of wood to someone in the audience and ask them to put the nail in the block themselves.

Having someone holding the actual props used in the trick helps make the routine feel even more real.

Finally, Allen even decided to present this routine on Penn & Teller: Fool Us. As he explained to us:

“I wanted to perform one of my own effects on the show. When I decided on The Pain Game, I wanted to do a slightly different version of the retail one. I came up with a way to show each of the other three blocks of wood as solid: no holes. I mentioned that it was an important point, but the camera pretty much missed me showing a solid block. It was something I considered briefly as an addition to the marketed version. In the end, I feel it wasn’t worth the extra expense for what it would add to general performances.”

I asked Allen to estimate how many times he has performed The Pain Game. He said, "A good few hundred times. And no," he added, "I've never impaled my hand doing it."

He explained further:

"Before The Pain Game, you still knew exactly where the sharp object was. Going back to that YouTube video — every magician in it knew where the sharp object was. It's now up to you, as a human being, not to screw up. Your brain can get rewired — this psychological thing of, if you're thinking about something, you gravitate towards it. So while you're thinking "don't hit the nail, don't hit the nail," that's what you're concentrating on — especially when you're down to the last two and do the fake-out, pretending to go for one but then at the last moment slamming your hand down on the other. That adds another layer of being able not to mess this up. So that's the danger — yes, you know exactly where it is, but now you've got to avoid it, and that's the difficult thing.”

One point I find really interesting. When people talk about The Pain Game, they sometimes say that this routine is all about safety. Allen doesn't subscribe to that. That's precisely why he didn't use a fake nail for the trick.

"If I used red sponge spikes, it's 100% safe; there's absolutely no way you can hurt yourself. You're not going to fool anybody with it, but it's 100% safe. I'm not saying that safety isn’t important in a Russian Roulette, but it's about the balance between a method that is safe and an effect where it's a sharp, solid nail, and the audience believes there's real danger involved."

Another safety advantage of The Pain Game is that what the performer needs to do happens right at the start, before the routine has really started. They only have to remember the setup. Allen advises writing a note and sticking it inside the bag where the nail goes.

When I started my conversation with Jon Allen, I expected that The Pain Game was mostly sold to professional magicians who had committed to include the routine in their show. It turns out I was wrong.

Magicians from every background have been purchasing the product.

Those who have always been curious about trying out a Russian Roulette routine buy The Pain Game because of its reputation. It's the go-to version of the trick.