Invisible City Productions

Cheater's Game: Game of the Month for January '09 · 1 January 09

They say that cheaters never win. Prove them wrong in this game for three to five unscrupulous would-be financial barons.

Cheater’s Game is a simple competitive game with a simple goal: End the tenth round with the highest score. Your score consists of two types of points: honest points and points you have from cheater’s alliances. Honest points are completely risk-free, but they’re harder to accumulate. Cheater’s alliance points are easy to accumulate, and accumulate faster when you have many players in your alliance. However, any member of an alliance can turn the other members of the alliance in and take the points, adding them to their honest score. So the question is, “How far you trust a group of self-admitted cheaters?”

Cheater’s Game uses about five standard six-sided dice, two point trackers, a turn tracker, player score pawns, and several sets of cheater’s alliance pawns.

The rules are available at: http://www.invisible-city.com/play/508

The trackers and pawns you need to play are all available as a 284 KB PDF.

Cheater’s Game has fairly simple rules, but complex psychosocial dynamics. You could play it with children as young as 6 or 7, and use it as a tool for teaching ethical and social lessons. I think that Cheater’s Game is appropriate for ages 12 and up without adult supervision. A 4-player game takes about 45 minutes to play.

PS: Although it’s probably obvious, we at Invisible City do not encourage or endorse cheating – especially when your success comes at the expense of others. This game is meant to help children understand recent events where adults in high-profile, high-responsibility occupations did bad things. This game is also an exploration of a possible way to reduce the appeal of cheating.

— Jonathan A Leistiko :: gaming : epiphanies

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