Ten Rivals▶Play

You meet ten rivals, eight rounds with each — the same ten every run, in a random order. 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 takes once just to test you. 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 Hall of Fame score is the coins you missed — the best possible total against the ten rivals minus what you actually took — so lower is better and a flawless run scores 0. Runs that miss the same number of coins are ranked by thinking time: the clock runs only while the Share and Take buttons are live, and stops while a reveal card is on screen.

Tips & strategy

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 ten rivals are the same every run; only their order is shuffled. Once you know the ten rules, each match becomes a question of which of the rivals you have not met yet is in front of you, and that gets easier as the run goes on — by the last match only one candidate is left, so you can play it perfectly from round one. Early in the run there are more possibilities, so a cheap probe on round one is worth more than it looks. Equal misses are split by thinking time, so once you have read a rule, play it out without hesitating.

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.