Sauron's Ransom

Fact or Fiction rebuilt with the paranoia dialed up. The original handed the split to an opponent and let you take one pile: a clean two-player tension where the divider, seeing all five cards, had to guess which ones you needed least. This version keeps that skeleton but flips who is working blind. The opponent still looks at the top four and still divides them, but instead of separating by "which pile I'd rather you take," they separate one pile face-up and one face-down. They know exactly what is in both. You do not. So the choice that used to belong to a fully informed caster now happens under a fog: you pick between visible cards and a pile you can only reason about. The face-down half lets the opponent bury a known bomb where you can't confirm it and dare you to grab the mediocre face-up cards instead, or stack a visible threat against a hidden dud to see if you'll flinch. The elegant symmetry of the original (both players staring at the same open board of options) gets replaced with a one-sided information gap that runs the wrong direction from what the effect looks like. The Ring tempts you is the sweetener that stops it from being a strict trade-down: you pay a known cost in information for a guaranteed rung up the Ring's ladder, so the spell advances your game state even when both piles resolve into nothing.