In the game each player takes up the role of a so-called "Illuminati". These are top secret organizations which try to grasp the rule of the world. To do so, the Illuminati use their Power to get influence over many different groups, organizations or personalities of modern society (USA, Germany, Manta-Fahrer, CIA etc.) After succeeding a takeover of such a group, the group is added to the power-structure of the sucessful illuminati and will now add its own special powers to the power of the illuminati, aiding him to win. A player wins if he eliminates all others from play, or if he gets control over a special number of groups.

Being decisive as a victory-condition and as valuable allies, the game itself and the action of the players is centered around the groups. The more groups an illuminati gets, the more the power structure of this illuminati expands. The illuminati may control 4 groups directly, which are placed around it. Being that near to the illuminati, these groups gain a high defense bonus which is needed to fend off takeovers by others players. Thus an illuminati always must take care to have defense resources, since other players may try to steal groups from an existing power structure. The 4 groups directly controlled by the illuminati may control groups of their own (and so on...), but the more distant the chain to the illuminati is, the more vulnerable the group is to attacks. So if a player has nearly enough groups to win, he naturally will have some more vulnerable groups and the other players automatically will try to get any of these in order to prevent the leading player from winning the game.

The heart of the game is the takeover-procedure needed to add or destroy a group. First, the groups have different allignments (democratic, criminal, violent etc.), which make it easier to take over a group of the same allingment or to destroy a group of the opposite allignment. Another thing are the power values of the groups. Many groups have only direct power, but some of the groups can use their power as global power, which means that they may use their power to add strenght to an attacker or defender. And most important, each group has one or more special abilities, allowing special procedures to gain a bonus in a takeover or to have any other influence on gameplay.

The game profits from a clever gameplay based on turns, during which each player may try to take over as many groups as he wants to. During a turn, a player first initiates an "automatic takeover" which allows him to bring a group from his hand-cards to his power- structure. Then each of the groups of the player gets a token on it, which means that the group may act this turn. Using these action tokens, the groups may try to take over other groups from the players hand or from an other playerīs power structure. But in most times itīs very important not to use these tokens during the playerīs turn but during an other playerīs turn. So a group which still has its action-token may defend at a higher rate, or it may still use its special abilities.

After having figured out the rules, the game is easy to play since there arenīt too many rules to learn. The fun in the game raises with the number of groups on the table, since many of their special abilities allow to twist the rules in some way (So the "Nuclear Power Plants" may use their action to cancel the action of any other group, but there also exists a politician called "Joschka Fischer" who may cancel the action of the "Nuclear Power Plants" in turn. But he may only do so if he is not assasinated before he can act.....). Another feature of the game are the so-called plot-cards. These are event cards of all kinds, in turn having much influence on gameplay.

The game is played best with 3 or 4 players participating. In this case there will be many groups on the table which is a guarantee for much action between the players. Personally, I really like the concept of the game and the very high degree of humor displayed on the cards. The game authors took many social groups or personalities and gave them as fitting attributes as possible, and the result of this was hillarious indeed. The game itself was originally designed as a trading card game, since it has 400+ cards and these cards are divided into the categories of common, uncommon and rare. Thus the cards can be bought in starter sets of 110 cards or in boosters of 15 cards each and normally each player uses his own deck of cards. The publishers in Germany went a step forward and published the game as a nice boxed set, containing 240 random cards, 40 glass-pieces used as action-tokens, 16 wooden pyramides to mark connections between groups and 2 illuminati dices. This set may be used as the start of a collection, but it may also be used for a game with more players using one "big" deck of cards for all of them. A last remarkable fact is that the german and the english version of the game has some differences concerning the cards. So the german edition contains many characters from german politics, whereas the english edition contains american politicians. But as far as I can guess from having seen just a few english cards, the versions are fully compatible. It was even reported to me that the english editions contains a card which could not be published here in Germany without rousing a major discussion: Itīs called "Hitlerīs Brain".....