Documentation

The rules of the regime

Everything you need to run a game of Dictator Dares: how turns work, how power is counted, all fifty-six cards, and how to host your own copy.

Getting started

Dictator Dares is played by 2 to 8 players around a single screen: a phone passed hand to hand, a laptop on the table, or a television. There is nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.

Open the game. Two players are already seated at court.
Click a name to rename it. Use Add a player for more, up to eight.
The player shown under Now ruling spins. Turns pass down the court in order.
The first to 15 power wins. A game usually lasts twenty to thirty minutes.

The game saves itself in your browser. Reload mid-game and nothing is lost. New regime resets the scores and keeps the players.

A turn

Spin. Press Spin the wheel, or press on the wheel and throw it. A harder throw spins longer. The wheel is not rigged: it lands wherever friction leaves it.
Read. The ruler under the red pin draws one of their four cards at random. A Dare is something to perform. A Question is something to answer, with the answer hidden until someone reveals it.
Perform. A thirty-second clock starts. It is a guide, not a guillotine.
Judge. The table presses Decreed or Overthrown.

Power and reign

A decreed dare pays the ruler’s base value plus your reign bonus, doubled if the Cult is behind you.

power = (base + min(reign, 3)) × (cult ? 2 : 1)

Your reign is the number of dares you have landed in a row, across turns. Each adds one power to the next, up to three. Being overthrown sets it back to zero. The Ides of March and the Cult leave it untouched.

Reign	Bonus	Franco pays	Napoleon pays	Napoleon with the Cult
0	+0	1	3	6
1	+1	2	4	8
2	+2	3	5	10
3 or more	+3	4	6	12

The two red sectors

The Ides of March

You take two power from whoever holds the most, at once, with no dare. If you are the leader, the daggers turn to the next in line. If nobody has any power, nothing happens. Your turn then ends.

Cult of Personality

Your next decreed dare pays double, reign bonus included, and you spin again immediately. A second Cult does not stack. If you are overthrown on that dare, the adoration is gone with your reign.

Judging

The table decides. The player on the wheel does not vote.
A split vote is Decreed. The game rewards nerve.
For Questions, the player answers first, then anyone presses Reveal the answer. Close enough counts: the table is the court of appeal.
Anyone may refuse any dare, for any reason, with no explanation. A refusal is Overthrown.

The catalogue

Four cards per ruler, in the order the rulers appear on the wheel. Hitler’s four cards are history questions only.

House rules

A short reign. Play to 10 power. About fifteen minutes.
A long dynasty. Play to 25 and raise the reign cap to 5.
Coalitions. Play in teams. The team chooses who performs each card, and nobody may perform twice in a row.
Amnesty. Each player may once per game swap a card for a fresh spin, without losing their reign.

Every card lives in one file, public/data.js. The numbers at the top set the target, the clock and the reign cap.

window.DD = {
  WIN: 15,        // power needed to win
  TIME: 30,       // seconds per dare
  MAX_REIGN: 3,   // cap on the reign bonus
  SECTORS: [
    { id:"napoleon", short:"NAPOLEON", base:3, dares:[
      { t:"act",  q:"Crown yourself..." },
      { t:"quiz", q:"On which island did Napoleon die?", a:"Saint Helena." } ]},
    ...
  ]
};

Self-hosting

The site is static files and a small Node server with no dependencies. It runs anywhere Node 18 runs.

npm start                 # http://localhost:3000

railway init -n dictator-dares
railway up
railway domain

Railway reads the start script and provides the port. There is no database and no environment variable to set.

$DARE, on-chain soon

The party game above is free and runs in your browser. The on-chain version turns the wheel into a round-based game, in the spirit of ORE, with a few twists of its own. The chain is not chosen yet. The full design is in the $DARE litepaper. None of this is live yet. No deposit, wallet or token exists today.

Rounds

Each round, players back one or more dictators.
The wheel spins once, with verifiable randomness.
The backers of the dictator it lands on split the round's pot, in proportion to their stake.
Every stake, winning or not, mines $DARE for that round.

The throne

The player who has mined the most $DARE over the current epoch sits on the throne. The dictator in place takes a small tribute from every round's pot for as long as they hold it. Anyone who mines more takes the throne from them. There is always a coup coming.

The red sectors

The Ides of March confiscates the pot of the most-backed dictator and shares it among the smallest camps.
The Cult of Personality pays nobody: the pot rolls into the next round and $DARE emission doubles for it.

Before any of this goes live it needs an audited on-chain program, a verifiable source of randomness, and a check of the gambling rules in each country where it is offered.

A note on the theme

The game laughs at dictators: their titles, their vanity, their propaganda and their ends. It never laughs at the people they ruled. Hitler is on the wheel for history, not for laughs: his cards are questions only, and no Nazi symbol appears anywhere in the game.