This is a game about taking over the world. Each player starts with a single powerful “Illuminati” group, which takes control of other groups, which subvert still other groups. But you are not the only would-be “Secret Master” out there, as other players plot and scheme around you. The conspiracies begin to fight each other using the puppets they control, and mayhem ensues.

It’s funny and dark and fake and true all at once. People have been playing it for decades, and soon we will be playing it online.

Last updated: May 23, 2021 16:43

Ultimately, this is a card-and-token game. Each player gets two kinds of cards: Groups and Plots.

Groups can be added under a player’s Illuminati, expanding that secret society and counting toward victory. Grow your conspiracy to 12 groups and win the game.

Plots are special cards, which let a player bend the rules of the game or otherwise do something unexpected. Remember playing Monopoly? Think of Plots like the “Chance” cards from Monopoly, except you get to pick a player to send directly to jail without collecting $200—also, maybe they get kidnapped or hit by a car on the way.

At the start of your turn, each player get two of each kind of card—drawn from a shared deck of groups and Plots. Also at the start of each turn, most groups you control get Action tokens, can be spent fueling a Plot or as part of an attack against another group.

Once each player has taken their turn, the first player goes again. You keep playing until someone ends their turn with enough groups to win. A game of Illuminati will have many twists and turns—it’s even possible for more than one player to win!

Last updated: May 23, 2021 20:08

If you are new to Illuminati, the basic move is an attack to control from one group to another, and it’s straightforward.

Each group card’s core stats come in two forms: as Power and Resistance, measured by a number from 1-10; and as Alignments, represented by icons.

Power and Resistance are the basic building blocks for action in the game. When one group attacks another, take the attacker’s Power minus the defender’s Resistance, and those are your basic odds.

I wanted to use the C.I.A.—with a Power of 6—and I’m targeting the Cycle Gangs—with a Resistance of 4—I’d need to roll a 2, on two virtual dice. Those are poor odds. (Anything below 2 automatically fails.)

Alignments may help or hinder an attack. Most Alignments come in opposing pairs, like Peaceful and Violent.

Shared alignments increase the chances of a takeover, while opposing alignments makes control more difficult. For example: the C.I.A. and the Cycle Gangs are both Violent, so the C.I.A. gets a +4 to take them over.

A 6 out of 10 suddenly sounds a lot better, though it’s still leaving a lot to chance. Other groups may be able to help—or, if controlled by an opponent, they could make the odds worse. Get the odds to 10 or higher, and the attack automatically succeeds.

Attacking to destroy a group, versus controlling it, pits Power against Power. Also, the effect of Alignments becomes opposite: it’s harder for one group to destroy a group like it, and easier to destroy one that’s different. The C.I.A. would have a hard time destroying the Cycle Gangs, even though they only have a Power of 1, because both groups are Violent. The Boy Sprouts also have a Power of 1, but they’re Peaceful—that’s a much better target for a Violent group.

Special abilities cover a wide range of things. They can make hard actions easier—for example, Cycle Gangs have a +2 to Destroy any group. They can even enable the impossible—for example, Germany can spend two Actions at a time, lying low for one turn and saving their Action, then launching a single attack with doubled strength after getting an Action token on their next turn.

This richness in game design helps Illuminati stand out from many card games and provides tremendous replay value.

This same richness can make the game more difficult for new players, without an experienced player to help lead the way.

As a video-game adaptation, Illuminati Confirmed is automating the many details which can slow down table-top play, letting players focus on their strategies and less on the wrangling the math. Besides being easier, it should make games shorter and tighter while allowing what’s so brilliant about Illuminati to really shine.

Last updated: May 23, 2021 20:08

Illuminati is a decades-old game. We’ve been working through the rules of the video game, Illuminati Confirmed, with help from Steve Jackson himself, though we can’t say we’re done yet. We’ve made a lot of progress from where we were during the previous Kickstarter (see the next FAQ), though still: while we’ve done a lot of testing with paper prototypes, we expect things to stay fairly fluid until our early adopters really help us lock things down.

That said, we don’t have elaborate documentation for the game at the same level as the table-top version, primarily because we’ve based our game on the table-top version. But which one?

Speaking broadly, there are two major versions of Illuminati.

There’s what we’ll call the original Illuminati, which covers the first edition in 1982 and its expansions, all the way up to the most recent version produced by Steve Jackson Games (and available for sale today): Illuminati, Second Edition.

Then there’s a version called Illuminati: New World Order, which appeared in the mid-1990s along with a few expansions. People call that version INWO for short, and it’s fairly different from the original version. From a practical perspective, it hasn’t been easily available for around 20 years so fewer people are super familiar with it today. Also, it’s more straightforward in some ways—Steve replaced Income, which was basically Power that could be spent and shared, with Action tokens; instead of limiting players to two actions per turn, you can take as many actions as your groups have tokens. It’s also more complex, giving group cards Attributes like Media or Magic or Nation, which work differently than Alignments. Also, instead of the occasional “+2 to Destroy any group,” each card has its own special rule or rules, which can take up a lot of text.

Naturally, Illuminati Confirmed—or ILCO—is based on INWO.

If you’re familiar with original Illuminati, the basic play will look familiar. The devil is in the details—specifically the card details and all the little bonuses and superpowers they come with. Also, the original game offered a small number of Special cards while INWO (and ILCO) introduces Plot cards. Each game has about as many Plot cards as groups, so there’s a lot you can do.

You can read up on the INWO rules here: http://www.sjgames.com/inwo/rules/inwo-rules-12.pdf —then specifically, for the One Big Deck modifying rules, see this: http://www.sjgames.com/inwo/rules/variants/onebigdeck.html

We’ll write up the more settled differences between INWO and ILCO in another FAQ.

Last updated: May 24, 2021 00:30

A lot of the joy of INWO is the logic-puzzle chaos of cards laid out all over the kitchen table with you and your friends holding it all in your heads and rolling dice, each Illuminati-player conducting the forces of the cards toward domination. It’s great! But a screen you can hold in your lap isn’t a kitchen table. With this video game, it’s like adapting a novel to cinema: it takes some reimagining to express the truth of the story.

The streamlined pyramid shape of Illuminati Confirmed lets people play INWO cards digitally after more than 25 years of waiting. The game is a variant modeled on INWO’s richness and complexity. It can’t be identical to the table-top version—to play to its strength as a video game, to be fun, it must be different.

In fact, since we modified the pyramid structure to put 3 cards on the first row, 4 on the second, and 5 on the third, we think it’s actually better than in a lot of ways than the physical, rely-on-printed-arrows scheme. Steve Jackson called it elegant, which may be the highest compliment he ever paid me. And the inviting pyramid shape and gameplay entice more players to play—meaning more fun for you. Happy to discuss it more if with anyone who has concerns.

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

We’ve been working on a chart to make it more clear—though we’ve also been working on the game, and unfortunately that seems more important overall.

But:

Classic Illuminati gets you at least 42 of the original Illuminati cards for $15, and lets you play games with friends who bring any number of expansion sets to the table, from NWO and ILCO to various expansion sets. It’s the “Play a Bit & Also with Friends” level.

New World Order gets you everything that comes with Classic, above, and at least 123 original INWO cards, faithfully adapted from that version of the game. As more INWO cards are released, you’ll get them, too. Depending on how it’s implemented, you may get Campaign mode.

Confirmed gets you at least 162 cards for that setting, plus everything that comes with New World Order (at least 123 cards) including the Classic cards (at least 42 cards), as well as any original INWO cards we release in the future. You also get the first expansion set, Cults of Personality; the second expansion set, Ancient Secrets; and Campaign mode, letting you begin in the 1980s and play through the 1990s and on through today—and beyond.

All-In gets you all Confirmed, plus everything else unlocked: the War & Peace expansion set (100+ cards), the Weird Science expansion (60+ cards), the DECK BLDG expansion (with the backer-only unlimited deck-building ability), along with anything else we unlock in the course of the campaign.

Find the level that’s right for you, and take over the world.

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

These are digital cards. As with a deck of real cards, you will enjoy “flipping though” them on your device. One thing about the Illuminati table-top games, simply going through the cards was enjoyable. They’re funny and interesting, and the art is great. We hope we’ve done the same now: offered you a valuable, enjoyable graphic art experience even if you never play the game. (But we want you to play the game.)

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

No. It is 100% electrons. Except of course for the one thing, but it’s not worth our lives to talk about that before they do.

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

We’re targeting desktop and mobile. Here’s how that breaks down.

For desktop, we’ll be shipping for Windows, macOS, and SteamOS (Linux). We can’t speak precisely to system requirements because the game remains a work in progress. Still, we’ve been making resource-considerate decisions in our design process.

For example, we’ve enormously reduced the number of 3-D models the game requires—play still takes place in a 3-D space with some dimensional components. Still, people have made it clear that this needs to run on not-new hardware, and we’re paying attention.

One of the reasons we chose Unreal Engine to build this game was due to how efficient it seems to be on a variety of platforms. Say what you will about Fortnite, it let Epic feed everything they learned about optimizing game graphics from large Windows PCs to tiny Android devices back into Unreal, to profit a ton of smaller developers like us.

In terms of mobile, we expect to run well and provide a great experience on tablets as well as many larger Android and Apple phones. I can’t promise it’ll be a wonderful experience on smaller phones, but…they sell an awful lot of Civilization VI on phones of different sizes, so someone likes the form factor for complex and fidgety gaming.

We have no specific plans for console gaming right now. Still, it seems as though the current and previous Xbox platforms should work well if Windows runs as smoothly as we expect. We would certainly like to get a Nintendo Switch dev unit at some point. If “Untitled Goose Game” can run on it, so should Illuminati Confirmed.

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

If you are playing with strangers, there will need to one some kind of time limit on turns. Consider the analog equivalent: if you’re playing with friends, there’s social pressure to make a move. While it might be a relaxed game or one that’s snappier, people enter into a game generally saying what time they want to go home, and everyone buys into an agreed-on pace. Hence the expression, “Dude, it’s your turn.”

Similarly, people want to enter into an online game feeling in control of and apprised of the pace of things.

Enter time-limits. We are exploring how to set those, and how players can have agree on them before they start playing.

We might have, for example, 24-hour time limits for international play. Maybe it turns into a month-long pleasure that trickles along.

We are considering your scenarios, is the point.

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

We’ve heard fans’ desires for a more sophisticated A.I. player—one capable of playing various Illuminati and not simply the diabolical Servants of Cthulhu, as well as one capable of running more than one instance at once—allowing, for example, multiple A.I. players to go up against some number of humans, up to the six-player maximum.

That has become part of the plan! We were approached by a Machine-Learning team who had high hopes about training a machine to play Illuminati. They seemed more concerned about stopping the training in time, before it would too easily devastate any human players.

While it’s been hard to get a firm commitment from the Machine-Learning team on short notice, it’s important enough to you that we will make a firm commitment to improved A.I. players in some form. We were going to make “Improved A.I.” part of an upcoming stretch goal, though the simple fact is that you all expect better from us, so we will do better for the core game.


Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

Welcome newcomers and old fans to the deck-building section.

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

Yes. Deck builders will only play with deck builders. If you’re new to this or don’t want to play that way, don’t worry about it. Come play Illuminati and have fun.

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

Deck building games operate differently from say a pack of traditional cards. With traditional cards, whether it’s Cribbage or Crazy-8s, everyone draws from the same deck.

With a deck-building game, players arrive with a deck assembled from cards that they own. Everyone sits down at the table with a different deck, and starts playing. Here we invoke Magic: The Gathering as a deck-building game likely everyone has heard of. (Perhaps you’re familiar with the very popular and fun Dominion—that’s a kind of deck-building game, though it operates a little differently from what people more often call deck-building games.)

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

In deck building mode, players come with their own decks. Backers of this Kickstarter—at the “New World Order” level and higher—can get unlimited deck-building features. This means you can add any number of any cards from any ILCO set, within whatever reasonable limits set by the game. No pawing through booster packs, no rarities, simply all the cards. If you’re into trading-card games, this is basically like unlimited trips to the taco bar but more tasty—plus, Illuminati cards.

Last updated: May 26, 2021 15:14

With “unlimited deck-building” (see previous FAQ) deck builders can add whatever they want from their sets—as can all other players. So the strategy is in assembling a deck you think you can win, a deck with a strategic line you enjoy taking. It’s not about paying for nuclear options.

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

Yes. You met our goal for the Kickstarter, so they are now real.

Last updated: May 25, 2021 01:34

That’s an unsettlingly specific question. If we did, only a small number of people would’ve solved the puzzle and gained access to the Illuminati’s forum, which will end up granting those people a few esoteric in-game bonuses, otherwise you might’ve heard more about it. Not that we did.

Last updated: May 26, 2021 15:14

Yes. Online games will be tracked from our server, and each client will interpret each player’s move in the same way. That means it shouldn’t matter if you’re playing over Windows on a giant desktop display, you’ll never need to realize that one of your opponents is on a train with an iPhone while another is in a secret, underwater lair with an Android tablet.

The one outstanding question we have: Will I be able to switch devices mid-game? It may be possible, as long as it wasn’t that player’s turn, to pick up another device and log into it—that could log you out from the other device and provide an opportunity to rejoin any game in progress.

Some people might not feel great about that, and might want to disable the feature. Still, I think it creates some interesting opportunities for progressing game play in situations where one player gets unpredictably disrupted—whether a train going through a long tunnel, a phone running out of power before you can get to power, or an armada from Atlantis destroying your underwater habitat and while you barely escape with your life you definitely want the option to keep playing once you’re back on the surface with easy cell-signal access.

But yes, we’re very much into cross play.

Last updated: May 26, 2021 15:11