Score
0
Best
-
Share or take, eight rounds at a time. Every rival follows a hidden fixed rule — find it and squeeze it.
Each round you and a rival choose at the same time whether to share or take. Both share and you get 3 coins each. You take while they share and you get 5 while they get nothing. Both take and you get 1 each.
You meet ten rivals, eight rounds with each. Every rival follows a fixed hidden rule and none of them is random: one copies your last move, one never forgives a single betrayal, one only shares until the fifth round, one simply repeats whatever you did first. Your job is to work out which rule you are facing and then take as much as that rule will let you.
The cost of finding out is real. Taking early tells you a lot, but against a rule that punishes betrayal it can wreck the whole match. Against a rival that always shares, every round you spend being nice is two coins thrown away.
After each rival the game tells you who they were, what their rule is, and the highest score that was possible against them, so you can see exactly what your reading cost you. Your score is the total coins from all ten rivals, and a perfect run is genuinely achievable.
Round one is your cheapest information, and most players waste it. Sharing on the first round keeps almost every rival friendly but tells you very little, because the majority of rules share on round one anyway. Taking on the first round splits the field immediately: the rules that punish betrayal show their teeth on round two, and the rules that do not are the ones worth robbing for the next six rounds.
The single biggest swing in the whole game is telling a pure sharer apart from a copier. Both look identical while you behave, and they are worth 40 coins and 26 coins respectively — the gap is larger than any other decision you make. One well-timed take resolves it in a single round, and the cost of being wrong is small if you apologise immediately, because a copier only mirrors one move back.
Always take on the final round. Every rule reacts to what you did before, and on the last round there is no after, so a rival that would have punished you never gets the chance. Against most opponents this is worth two extra coins for free, and the players who forget it leave roughly twenty coins on the table over a full run.
Watch for rivals whose behaviour does not depend on you at all. One alternates forever, one shares for exactly five rounds and then turns, and one takes no matter what. None of them can be steered, so stop being polite the moment you recognise them and simply take every remaining round. The tell is that their move changes while yours does not, which is the opposite of everything else in the game.
The reveal screen after each rival is the real teacher. If you scored below the best possible, replay the eight rounds in your head against the rule you were just shown and find the round where you paid for information you already had. Almost every lost coin in this game comes from probing a rule you had already identified.