Prisoner's Dilemma

The rare burn spell that hands the outcome to the people it's aiming at, and does it with a scoring table lifted straight from game theory's most famous thought experiment. The math is built to punish coordination: universal silence stings for four, universal snitching hits for eight, but the mixed outcome (one opponent snitches while others stay quiet) obliterates the silent ones for twelve while sparing the snitch entirely. That asymmetry is the whole engine. Every opponent knows that betraying the table is the individually safe play, since snitching either doubles the shared damage or vaporizes anyone who trusted the group. The dominant strategy is defection, exactly as the original dilemma predicts, and the card is designed to make rational self-interest tear a multiplayer pod apart before a single point of damage resolves. Its power scales not with your board but with the paranoia around the table, which is why it lives in the negotiation-and-deal-brokering corner of design where the card is really a social instrument. The flashback clause matters here: it lets you run the experiment twice, and the second offer arrives with the memory of the first, so any table that got burned for trusting each other now has a reason to defect preemptively. Damage is the payload; the actual product is the breakdown of an alliance.