This is a history of the beginning of an online game of Illuminati: New World Order. This is the private history of the game, with the details of every card that players had in their hand, and every conspiracy that they remembered to show me.
This trial game was played with decks that I had seen posted on the INWO list by Nick Gaut some months ago, with the assertion that the decks were reasonably balanced against each other. There were five players in the game, playing in the following order. I've added links to the decks each played.
Ralph Melton (ralph@cs.cmu.edu) served as moderator and coordinator for the game. The word I in this document refers to Ralph.
The game was played by Pittsburgh House Rules.
All players revealed their Illuminati simultaneously:
Most of the players had decided on their lead puppet without needing to look at their initial plot cards. Even so, each person drew three plots before the lead puppets were revealed.
These were the lead puppets that were revealed. The Nuclear Power Companies were extremely popular for their action-cancelling ability.
Don Fnordlioni, Steve Hatherley, and Glen Barnett all bounced on their lead. (Glen declared that this had been his intention, to try to make someone else bounce on the NPCs.) Those three players set aside their copies of the Nuclear Power Companies, and selected other lead puppets. These were revealed simultaneously:
There were no conflicts on this second phase of lead puppets.
All players shuffled their Group decks and then drew six Group cards. Don Fnordlioni, Steve, and Glen then put their Nuclear Power Companies cards back in their deck and re-shuffled, so that those NPCs cards couldn't be in their first six Group cards. (Doing this shuffling was much easier to do electronically than it would have been with real cards.)
We decided by a random process that Jason would go first. In a live game, we would do so by rolling dice; because this was an electronic game, it was decided by Ralph doing a random selection.
Jason's power structure at the beginning of the turn:
Adepts of Hermes ( ) 1: Religious Reich ( ) 1: 2: 2: 3: 4:
(We decided to dismiss with the exact location of control arrows early on, since that information wasn't available in our online references, and didn't seem to be a great imbalance to the game.)
Jason drew a Plot card and a Group card.
His automatic takeover was the Templars, off of the Adepts of Hermes.
He took Action tokens on all three of his groups.
His first action was to play Grassroots Support on the Religious Reich, spending their action token to do so. This had the effect of raising the power of the Religious Reich permanently to 6.
Jason declared an attack by the Adepts of Hermes upon the Great Pyramid that he had in his hand. The Adepts' power was 7, +6 on any attempt to control any Magic Group, which applies since the Great Pyramids have the Magic Attribute. The resistance of the Great Pyramid was 4. The net roll, therefore, is 7 (power of the attacking group) - 4 (Resistance of the group under attack) + 6 (Bonus to attack Magic groups) = 9 or less.
Jason decided that that was a good enough roll, so he did not involve any more groups. No other players could interfere with the attack, because it was Jason's first turn.
Jason rolled the dice. He rolled an 8. The attack was a success. The Great Pyramid was now controlled by the Adepts of Hermes, since they were the group that led the attack.
Jason then knocked to signal the end of his turn. Play passed to Don Fnordlioni.
Jason's power structure at the end of his turn:
Adepts of Hermes ( ) 1: Religious Reich ( ) 1: 2: 2: Templars (*) 1: 3: Great Pyramid ( ) 1: 4:
Back to Ralph's INWO page.
Back to Ralph's Home page.
Last modified: October 6, 1996