I’ve often said that tabletop games teach you things that have nothing to do with rolling dice or moving pieces around a board.
Sometimes they teach strategy.
Sometimes they teach teamwork.
Sometimes they teach creative problem-solving.
And occasionally… they accidentally teach a group of high school seniors how to form a secret conspiracy.
This is one of those stories.
Little Black Boxes and Big Ideas
I started playing tabletop games back in the 1980s with my longtime friend Mark Nicovich. Like many gamers of that era, we were huge fans of Steve Jackson Games.
Our favorites included Car Wars, OGRE, GEV, GURPS, and, perhaps most importantly for this story, Illuminati.
One thing I loved about those games was their packaging. They came in sturdy little black plastic boxes that were practically indestructible. We’d toss them into our backpacks and haul them back and forth between school and each other’s houses without a second thought.
Then, sometime in the late ’80s or early ’90s, I won something incredible at CoastCon in Gulfport.
Steve Jackson Games was giving away an official Illuminati Membership Kit, and somehow I ended up with one.
Inside were membership cards for all of the famous Illuminati factions from the game—the Bavarian Illuminati, the Gnomes of Zurich, and others—along with an official Illuminati lapel pin.
To teenage me, this was about the coolest thing imaginable.
Naturally, I dove headfirst down the rabbit hole.
I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. I tracked down and devoured the Principia Discordia. Suddenly my vocabulary included words like “Discordian,” “Illuminatus,” and, of course…
FNORD.
Mr. Hinton’s Experiment
Fast forward to my senior year at Petal High School.
Our U.S. History teacher, Mr. Hinton, had an annual classroom exercise designed to teach us about the American justice system.
The concept was simple.
He divided the class into police officers and drug dealers.
(The early ’90s were… a different time.)
The “drug dealers” were given little plastic bags filled with Easter grass to represent narcotics. Everyone received fake money. During the week the dealers would secretly sell their fake drugs while the police tried to catch them in the act.
Anyone arrested would eventually go through a mock trial where we’d learn about due process, evidence, and the court system.
It was actually a pretty clever exercise.
Unfortunately for Mr. Hinton…
…he had accidentally included five tabletop gamers.
Someone You Trust Is One of Us
My friends Mark, Sean, Scott, Michael, and I looked at the assignment and immediately recognized an opportunity.
Why simply play cops and robbers?
Why not play Illuminati?
So we secretly formed our own organization.
The Petal High School Chapter of the Illuminati.
Our membership included both police officers and drug dealers.
Our objective wasn’t to enforce the law.
It wasn’t even to sell drugs.
Our goal was much more ambitious:
Acquire every dollar of fake money and every bag of fake drugs in circulation before the exercise ended.
Our police officers quietly protected our own dealers.
Our dealers identified competing dealers.
Then our cops conveniently caught those competitors.
Every arrest concentrated more wealth and contraband into Illuminati hands.
It was glorious.
We even went all in on the theme.
We wore Illuminati buttons.
We developed a secret handshake.
Our password was, naturally…
FNORD.
And we shamelessly borrowed our motto directly from the Steve Jackson game:
Someone you trust is one of us.
The best conspiracies hide in plain sight.
The Trial of the Century
Eventually, our classmate Leslie, who had been assigned the role of District Attorney, started noticing something wasn’t adding up.
Certain police officers seemed remarkably selective.
Certain dealers never seemed to get caught.
Money kept disappearing.
Evidence wasn’t behaving.
Witnesses were… unreliable.
She finally approached Mr. Hinton with an idea.
She wanted to prosecute all of us—not for drug dealing—but for criminal conspiracy.
Mr. Hinton loved it.
Soon every U.S. History class gathered together for what became the trial of the century.
It was less Law & Order and more complete chaos.
Witnesses contradicted themselves.
Statements were recanted.
Evidence mysteriously vanished.
People suddenly couldn’t remember anything.
At one point, Michael dramatically faked a heart attack while on the witness stand.
Looking back, I honestly feel sorry for Mr. Hinton.
He was trying to teach constitutional law.
Instead he found himself presiding over what looked suspiciously like an episode of Night Court written by a group of roleplayers.
The Verdict
After all the testimony…
After all the accusations…
After all the theatrical nonsense…
Mr. Hinton delivered his verdict.
There simply wasn’t enough evidence to prove a conspiracy.
The Illuminati walked free.
Mission accomplished.
The Lesson We Actually Learned
I’m not sure this was the lesson Mr. Hinton intended to teach.
He wanted us to learn about evidence, due process, reasonable doubt, and the justice system.
Oddly enough…
…we did.
We also learned something Steve Jackson had been teaching us all along.
Games aren’t just entertainment.
They shape the way we solve problems.
They encourage us to think sideways.
To work together.
To question assumptions.
To invent elaborate plans that probably shouldn’t work—but somehow do.
And sometimes they leave you with stories that are still making you laugh thirty years later.
So if you ever find yourself wondering whether tabletop games can have a lasting impact on young people…
Well…
Remember the Petal High School Chapter of the Illuminati.
After all…
Someone you trust just might be one of us.