Illuminati: Deluxe Edition (Original)

Complexity Medium Cost £25 Duration Medium-Long Players 2-6 expands to 8 Producer Steve Jackson Games Size Medium

Premise

It's not paranoia when they are out to get you

Review

This game is now in at least its third incarnation. These comments relate to the original Deluxe Edition. The original dates back to 1982 and has been a top seller since then (and rightfully so). Don't confuse this game with INWO, which is the collectable card game version. I prefer the original version.

This game is all about the Illuminati and how they control the world. You use your Illuminati to control groups (normally amusing paradies of the real thing) and these can in turn control other groups. The different Illuminati have different victory conditions just to make life fun.

The various group cards in play form a hierarchy around your Illuminati and once you have a group you can use them to attack and control or destroy new groups. Each group has various attributes associated with it, power is the raw attack rating, resistance is how well it resists attacks, income is how much money it generates each turn, and also it has alignments, which give bonuses when attacking groups with identical or opposite alignments. All attacks can be suplemented with money, and money can be used to defend in attacks.

Various special cards add to the interest, and there are optional rules for cheating (which can be very hilarious indeed).

The main delight in this game are the cards and their satirical names and abilities. One downer is the fiddly small money, although moving around lots of large piles of small money can be very theraputic, and the unpredictable nature of the game, it could last a long time with experienced players. Even so, the original game had smaller cards and money, so it has improved. Compared with the german games, the component quality is low at this price however, but this could have improved in the current version.

This is one of my favourite games however, and I recommend it to anyone. The new version is just as good, and just as satirical.

Rating

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