FLAMES is a well-known name-matching game that reduces two names down to one of six traditional outcomes: Friends, Love, Affection, Marriage, Enemy, or Sibling. It is a letter-counting exercise passed down through popular numerology practice, and VedicShala presents it with the same measured, educational tone as every other calculator on this site.
First, every letter shared between the two names is cancelled out, one matching pair at a time, until no more shared letters remain in common between the two names. The letters left over in both names are then counted together to get a single number. Starting from the word FLAMES, that number is used to count around the remaining letters and eliminate one at a time, the same way a group of people might count off and eliminate every third person in a circle, until a single letter is left. That final letter maps to one of the six outcomes: F for Friends, L for Love, A for Affection, M for Marriage, E for Enemy, and S for Sibling.
The cancellation step is what makes FLAMES sensitive to spelling. Two names that share many letters cancel down to a small number, while two names with few letters in common leave a larger number behind, and that count is what drives the entire elimination that follows. This is why the same two people can sometimes get a different result if one of them types a nickname instead of a full name.
Take the names RAVI and MEERA. Comparing letter by letter, the shared letters R and A cancel out between the two names, leaving V and I from RAVI, and M, E, and E from MEERA. That is five letters left in total. Counting off five at a time around F-L-A-M-E-S, eliminating one letter per round, leaves a single letter: F, for Friends. The calculator on this page runs this exact process on whatever two names you enter and shows the letters that were cancelled along the way.
Type both names into the form fields above and the result appears instantly, along with the list of letters that were cancelled out between the two names. Nothing you enter is sent to a server or saved anywhere, so you can try several name pairings in a row without any of them being kept.
FLAMES is best known as a schoolyard game played with pen and paper, and it has stayed popular in numerology-adjacent circles precisely because the mechanics are simple enough to run by hand. This calculator automates the same cancel-and-count process so you can check the result instantly and try several name pairings in a row without redoing the letter-counting each time.
FLAMES is a letter-counting method applied consistently to any two names, not a scientific measurement of how two people relate to each other. Different spellings of the same two names, including nicknames or shortened forms, will often cancel a different set of letters and can change the final result. Treat the outcome as a traditional game to enjoy with friends and family, not a determination of how a relationship will actually turn out, and never as the basis for a real decision about a friendship or a relationship.