Magic tricks with no props or equipment

About these tricks

These magic tricks need no equipment at all, nothing but your hands and your voice, which makes them the ones to know in a car, a queue, a waiting room or at the dinner table. Half of them are mind-reading tricks where arithmetic does the work; the rest are done with your own fingers: a thumb that comes off, a finger that stretches, and an eleventh finger that appears out of a count.

It is a short list, and we say so: most magic needs something to make disappear. If a pencil and a sheet of paper count as no props where you are, the easy tricks page has dozens more, and the picker can hand you one that fits what is in your pocket.

By level, 7 Apprentice (works the first try) and 1 Conjurer (a little practice). They come off 2 shelves of the shop, most from The Mind Reader's Corner (5) and The Everyday Shelf (3). None has a step only a grown-up can do, and none uses anything small enough to need the choking note. The quickest to learn is The Answer Is Always 3 (2 minutes); the longest is The Secret Partner Code (15 minutes).