The Trilateral Conspiracy

The Trilateral Conspiracy is a mid-level traitor mechanic game that typically takes about 90 minutes to play. One player (by random draw) is assigned as the Protagonist and is the leader of a group of Heroes trying to expose the Conspiracy. Another player will secretly start the game as an Agent, posing as a Hero. Agents win when the Heroes lose. All other players begin with a Resolve score between 1 and 9. They start out on the Hero's side, but if and when one of the nine "Conspiracy Expands" cards is revealed in the game, they will switch to an undercover Agent if their Resolve is equal to or lower than the number of Conspiracy Expands cards revealed thus far. Consequently some players who start as Heroes may choose to play as if they were already Agents right away, others will be Heroes to the end, and some may hedge their bets and try to play both sides.

There are eight locations on the board that serve as potential centers of the Conspiracy. The main goal of the Heroes is to identify which location it is, and then successfully infiltrate it enough to get the information they need to expose the Conspiracy. The way to figure out which is the correct one is to infiltrate three other locations known as the Halls of Power. If successful, each one will eliminate half of the possible locations and all three together will pinpoint it. The twelfth location makes all of the other infiltrations easier.

On their turn, players will typically do three things. They will move to a location, play a card on that location if they wish, and then they can either use that location's power (to do things like draw or trade cards) or they can try to infiltrate it. The purpose for playing cards is to make a location easier (or harder) to infiltrate. The cards range from -5 to +5 and each location starts with one random card on it. If a player chooses to try and infiltrate a location, they shuffle the cards on top and then reveal all of them. If the sum of the cards is equal to or greater than a certain changing difficulty number, they succeed. Otherwise they fail and may face a penalty.

Successfully infiltrating one of the Halls of Power lets the person doing the infiltration discover one of the leaders of the Conspiracy which in turn narrows down the possible locations of the Conspiracy. However only the infiltrating player gets to see the card and they may or may not tell the truth about what they saw. Once the Heroes have an idea of which location is the center of the Conspiracy, they will try to infiltrate it. If successful, they may take a card from their hand and place it underneath that location.

The game typically ends when the Protagonist feels the Heroes have played enough cards under the proper location and calls an end to the game. At that time the cards under the Halls of Power are revealed and the true center of the Conspiracy is determined. Then the cards under there (if any) are added up and if the total does indeed meet or beat a certain difficulty (called the Exposure Level), the Heroes win. Otherwise the Agents win. The Agents also win if the deck runs out of cards or if the Protagonist is killed in a failed infiltration. The Heroes can alternately win if the Exposure Level ever drops to 0.