Choose Your Demise
A rare thing in the Archenemy scheme deck: a card advantage engine built on a Prisoner's Dilemma rather than a raw handout. The archenemy sees four cards; the opponents see one pile face-up and know only that a hidden pile exists alongside it. Whoever chooses is guessing which pile the archenemy stacked with the good stuff and which is bait, and the archenemy's job is to make both piles look equally threatening. That is a genuinely different bargaining structure from most scheme designs, which simply drop resources or damage on the table. Here the value the archenemy extracts is a function of the opponents' read: hide the two best cards face-down and the bomb behind an obvious lure, and a cautious table can still hand it over by overthinking the visible pile. The mechanic mirrors the split-and-choose logic of Fact or Fiction, but inverts the tension: in Fact or Fiction, the caster reveals everything and lets the opponent divide the spoils; here the archenemy conceals half the information and forces a blind commitment. The cards left behind go to the bottom in any order, so nothing is truly wasted, only deferred. It is a scheme about controlling perception rather than the board, which suits the multiplayer politics Archenemy was built to stage.
