Playing Dead

Ronald Hayden

How I Became Dead
BYOND the Dead
Your name
is your fate...
The BYOND game
building system

Illuminati: New World Order
I played the original Illuminati in high school, back when you had to cut up lots of little squares of yellow money provided with the game in order to play. Illuminati, along with Car Wars and D&D and such were formative experiences, so I was excited to find out it had been revived as a trading card game, ala Magic: The Gathering.

Unfortunately, while the cards themselves are quite clever and well-thought out, the rulebook reads like what it is: 15 or 20 years of accumulated complications, added one at a time to cover some specific circumstance, but never integrated into a unified whole. As a result, everything is spread out, some material is repeated but with contradictory information, and much is just plain confusing.

To enhance playability (it wasn't much fun spending all our time trying to figure out what the rules were for our current situation and often failing), I went through and "flattened out" the rules to provide this Illuminati Cheat Sheet , designed to be printed out and used as an aid while you play.

Try it out and let me know if you have any suggestions.

ron@deadron.com