Clue-Anon

In CLUE-ANON, 3-4 players take on the role of conspiracy influencers in the batshit attention economy, competing to uncover several nefarious conspiracies... or pursue other agendas…

• Are the space aliens working with the deep state, funded by an evil corporation to steal the election?
• Could satanists be in league with the military-industrial complex to abduct children, and is it being hidden by the mainstream media?
• And what if I told you that shadowy foreign agents using a secret society to hire paid protesters to undermine civilization by faking the moon landing?

In this game, players use their influence to gain money and followers, and mobilize these resources to investigate the conspiracy, making guesses either secretly (which is safer) or in public (which attracts money and followers but…)

While at first it appears that all players are seeking the truth, each actually has a secret character, and their motivations are far from innocent.

• True, the Independent Journalist might be seeking to learn what’s really going on and share it with the world.
• But the Social Media Corporation is mostly interested in how conspiracies can drive engagement and increase revenue, and the YouTube Grifter is after followers.
• They’re all trying to influence the True Believers while the Troll Army just delights in causing chaos. And there is a Secret Agent who really is spying on everyone.

CLUE-ANON is a delightful way to discover what makes conspiracy theories so much fun… and so dangerous.

Designer Max Haiven began working on CLUE-ANON in 2021 as part of the Conspiracy Games and Countergames research project he undertook with Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and A.T. Kingsmith, who helped refine the game. That project also included a research podcast with experts on conspiracism, on games and their intersections, as well as essays and interviews in public and in academic venues. A free printable version of CLUE-ANON can be found at the Itch.io page of Max’s gaming outfit, Our Move.

GAMEPLAY, IN A NUTSHELL

A full game of CLUE-ANON is played across three Scenarios, although the first time you play you may just want to play one scenario for practice. Each scenario has slightly different rules to keep things spicy.

In each scenario, three of nine possible Suspects are placed beneath the board: these are known as the Three Conspirators. The other six are placed on top.

Over six Rounds, players take Turns collecting and spending two kinds of resources, Money($) and Followers(f), to investigate and look (secretly) at the six suspects, trying to deduce the hidden Three Conspirators.

As conspiracy influencers, players gain more resources by making guesses. A player can choose to play a guess card face-up, revealing it to everyone and gaining extra resources, or make their guess face-down, only benefitting when the Three conspirators are finally revealed.

In each of a scenario’s six rounds, a new event happens that changes the flow of the game.

At the end of six rounds, the Three Conspirators are revealed and players gain (*)RIGHT! or (x)WRONG! tokens depending on how many of their guesses are (in)correct, and whether they were made publicly or not.

At the end of the game, players gain Victory Points (VP) based on the tokens they’ve accumulated over the three scenarios.

At the beginning of each game each player is randomly assigned a Secret Character, and at the end of the game the gain bonus points (or lose points) depending on their character’s motivations. Players also gain points for correctly guessing their opponent’s Secret Character, and they lose points if theirs is guessed by their opponents.