How a gift becomes retired

Sooner or later someone else takes your mp3 player away from you again. This time you take someone elses gift, a bottle of rare Scotch. Then yet another person takes your bottle of rare Scotch from you and now you can go back and get your Mp3 player again. By this time, since the mp3 player was taken from you last, it might have been owned by several other players and in some cases more than once. Now this is the third time you have owned the mp3 player and this time it is yours to keep. The mp3 player is retired and you are now out of the game. The BIG confusion for some folks seems to be the third time the mp3 player is exchanged that the third owner gets to keep them. Not so. The gift is retired after the third time a single participant gets the same gift back into their possession. Using the 10 player game in this example, each player could take temporary possession of the mp3 player twice for a total of 20 exchanges. However, if you played by the 3rd owner rule you would only have 3 exchanges. The third time same owner rule allows more players to have a chance at the mp3 player. This also has a hidden purpose in forcing everyone to keep track of who has had possession of what gifts and how many times. This makes for more active involvement rather than passive involvement and is one of the keys to the games popularity.