Cheater's Game 2009

Cheater’s Game is a simple competitive game with a straightforward 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 alliance's 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 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. Cheater’s Game is appropriate for Ages 12 and up without adult supervision. A 4-player game takes about 45 minutes to play.