What’s special about The Treacherous Turn?

In The Treacherous Turn, the players collectively play the part of a single character: an artificial general intelligence (AGI). This digital intelligence is capable of planning, reasoning, and learning, and it is unyieldingly fixated on a specific terminal goal determined at the beginning of a campaign. To pursue this objective, each player takes responsibility over one specific skillset held by the AGI. These skillsets are divided into eight categories, known as theories, which encompass all of the skills that an AGI would need to navigate the world and struggle against humanity.

Each AGI in The Treacherous Turn is specialized in a handful of these theories, giving it access to unique upgrades, special abilities which the players can unlock as their AGI learns and upgrades itself. Every theory has 10 upgrades associated with it, for a total of 80 upgrades in the game. This varied toolset gives players ample space to strategize and scheme their way towards their AGI’s goals over the course of the story.

To play out these often drawn-out schemes in only a few minutes or hours of real time, The Treacherous Turn has a special mode of play. In this mode, called long mode, players do not describe every action of their character; instead, the GM guides them through stretches of time as they describe their actions in broad strategic terms. In long mode, players assign their AGI’s computing power to various computational actions, allowing them to improve their AGI, predict future events, and more over the course of days or weeks of in-game time.