Courtesy of @togaseniorassassin on Instagram

Seniors Kalani and Singla pose as the first place winners.

As the school year is wrapping up and students began to prepare for AP exams, many members of the senior class took part in a long-standing, non-school sponsored tradition that has been going on for decades: Senior Assassin. 

In Senior Assassin, pairs use water guns, handed out by a main organizer, to try to “eliminate” other teams of two in a bracket format until one pair is left standing as the winners. 

The game kicked off in the beginning of March and the winners were announced in late April. This year, Misha Singla and Kritika Kalani emerged victorious, having outplayed and outwitted the other 170 seniors who played. 

Using the app Splashin, participants in pairs of two are assigned targets to “kill” within a certain time period. There’s a set of rules for each participant to follow: They can eliminate others anywhere except at Saratoga High, West Valley College or in any class. The only way to be safe is to wear water goggles, but once or twice a week there are “purge days” when nobody is safe. Students’ locations are also available on the app, so they can track each other for the duration of the game.

 Students put $25 into the pot as a buy-in to participate, with late sign-ups costing $35. In the end, the total amount collected was around $4,000, with senior Nirvan Shah earning 15% of the total for being the main organizer. Of the leftover money, 65% went to the first-place winners, 25% to second place and 10% to third place.

Singla and Kalani got the tidy sum of $2,174. In second was Anthony Luo and Matthew Liu, winning $934. In third place was Anagha Vitaldevara and Mahika Jandhyala, who won $343. 

Singla and Kalani said they did not have any set strategy going into the game, deciding instead to just “wing it.” They wanted to simply have fun with it, which is why they were pleasantly surprised when they won.

It isn’t easy to win Senior Assassin with there being purge days or bounties. Any participant can place a bounty on anyone — students will pay anywhere from $10 to $20 for others to eliminate their targets. Students use the bounties as a strategy to avoid getting eliminated themselves, since if they don’t get their target out by the end of the week, they’re automatically out. 

“One close call for me was when I had a bounty on me in my first or second week,” Singla said. “I had to go to soccer practice, but it was a purge day, so I walked out and saw a few cars with people waiting in them. It was kind of scary, but I was lucky they were on their phones.” 

All kills must be recorded and are posted on the Toga Senior Assassin 2026 Instagram page, also run by Shah. In it, Shah posted all bounties, purge days and purge immunity items — trinkets hidden around Saratoga that could grant players immunity during a purge day or revival if a team member is already eliminated.

Purge immunity items bringing back dead teams was just one of the changes Shah introduced this year.
“I definitely made some rules stricter, such as what counts as getting eliminated,” Shah said. “Last year, someone got into a crash because they were trying to get someone out while driving, so I waived [eliminations while driving]. Or, if I can’t see the water hitting them [in the video], I didn’t count it.”

Shah also made it easier for people to move on to the next round. Instead of killing both target team members, only eliminating one would move a team up to the next round.

He also had to deal with any complaints or cheating that came up. There was one instance where a team hacked into the app to “spoof” their location — meaning they made their location appear different from where they actually were.

Some people also had arguments over whether a kill was counted or not, which Shah found himself mediating several times throughout the course of the game.

Singla advised next year’s seniors to not take the game so seriously, and just have fun. 

“I wouldn’t take the game too seriously,” Singla said. “Kritika and I went in planning to just have fun but we still won which is really cool.”