CLUE-ANON
A board game about what makes conspiracy theories fun... and dangerous - free to download and play
In CLUE-ANON, 3-4 players take on the role of conspiracy influencers in the batshit attention economy, competing to uncover nefarious conspiracies... or pursue other agendas…
Are the space aliens working with the deep state, funded by an evil corporation to steal the election? Could satanists be in league with the military-industrial complex to abduct children, and is it being hidden by the mainstream media? And what if I told you that shadowy foreign agents are using a secret society to hire paid protesters to undermine civilization by faking the moon landing?
In this game, players use their influence to gain money and followers, and mobilize these resources to investigate the conspiracy, making guesses either secretly (which is safer) or in public (which attracts money and followers but…)
While at first it appears that all players are seeking the truth, each actually has a secret character… and their motivations are far from innocent.
True, the Independent Journalist might be seeking to learn what’s really going on and share it with the world. But the Social Media Corporation is mostly interested in how conspiracies can drive engagement and increase revenue, and the YouTube Grifter is after followers. They’re all trying to influence the True Believers while the Troll Army just delights in causing chaos. And there is a Secret Agent who really is spying on everyone.
CLUE-ANON is a delightful way to discover what makes conspiracy theories so much fun… and so dangerous.
I began working on CLUE-ANON in 2021 as part of the Conspiracy Games and Countergames research project I undertook with Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and A.T. Kingsmith, who helped develop the game. That project also included a research podcast with experts on conspiracism, on games and on their intersections, as well as essays and interviews in public and in academic venues.
A free printable version of CLUE-ANON can be found at the Itch.io page of my gaming outfit, Our Move.
CLUE-ANON takes under an hour to learn and play and is suitable for inexperienced board game players. The print-at-home package includes everything you need to play and is free.
I am grateful to have been able to present and playtest Clue-Anon in many academic and non-academic contexts, including the “Games, incorporated” conference hosted by the journal ephemera in Malmö in June of 2022. The journal will publish CLUE-ANON soon, in conjunction with my essay “Why Play Games with Conspiracies?”, which is already online.
Stay tuned in the next months for the launch of the kickstarter campaign for Billionaires and Guillotines.
In the board game Billionaires and Guillotines, players take on the role of 2-5 rival plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all lose… a lot more than their assets.
Billionaires and Guillotines will be published in 2025 by Pluto Press.
For those in London, please join us on the late afternoon of January 16 at UCL’s Institute for Advanced Studies for the launch of the latest book in the VAGAGBONDS series (which I edit for Pluto Press): Nicholas Mirzoeff’s profound, timely and moving To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7, which is available now for preorder.
To see Palestine is to see the world. Since October 7th 2023, the forces of racial capitalism, settler colonialism and white supremacy have become all too visible in Israel's war on Gaza. Urban, networked Gazan youth have documented and shared their struggle with the world using social media strategies, derived from movements from Tahrir Square to Black Lives Matter.
In To See In The Dark, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores how these videos and photos transmitted and viewed outside Palestine, via platforms like Instagram and TikTok, enabled a dramatic switch in public opinion, leading to the global uprising against genocide.
In this groundbreaking analysis, he also connects the personal and the political via his own anti-Zionist Jewishness, weaving an autotheory of domestic, political and sexual violence. Through this exploration, he finds new collective anticolonial ways of seeing, combining online and embodied experiences.
Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor and chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Among the founders of the interdisciplinary practice of visual culture, he has published a dozen books and many articles. His book How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). It has been translated into eleven languages and was a New Scientist Top Ten Book of the Year for 2015. His book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013. In 2023, he published White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (MIT Press) and An Introduction to Visual Culture (Third edition, Routledge). A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in The Nation, Hyperallergic, Frieze, the New York Times, the Guardian, Time and The New Republic.