I Went Undercover in Crypto’s Answer to ‘Squid Game.’ It Nearly Broke Me
Before the game began, I listened to back to my conversations with CTG players from previous seasons, hoping to glean some essential wisdom that might help me to survive at least a couple of nights.
Their advice was generally to fly low; not to do anything that would mark me out as either particularly competent or overly hapless. Leaders are quickly eliminated, as are deadweights.
“To some degree, almost being invisible was a super strength,” said Phelps. “You don’t want to be absent, because you’ll get killed for not contributing. And you don’t really want to stick your head up. Then people think you might be a risk to them.”
Katy Jeremko, founder of developer cooperative Indie and another former player, had given me an equally precious piece of advice: “Your vote is your most valuable currency.”
With those warnings ringing in my ears, I entered the game on March 10 and was placed into the Gold Tribe along with around 70 other players.
Immediately, people fell into archetypal character roles: there were leaders, organizers, data nerds, hype artists, and wallflowers. One person set up a Telegram group and began to ferret away in a spreadsheet. Another “vibe-coded” a program that scraped blockchain data to track who remained in the game. Others shitposted in the chat. Paralyzed by fear of saying the wrong thing, I said very little more than hello.
Privately, I created my own spreadsheet to make notes on my tribe members, recording their every minor infraction. “Kinda annoying,” I scribbled next to one guy’s handle. “Muppet, get rid,” I wrote next to another. I had met them barely hours earlier.
Initially, I floated through the nightly eliminations by being performatively present. I contributed to the challenges, updated the spreadsheets when required, and posted in the chat at intervals. The tribe adopted “Gold morning” as a greeting, so I started saying it too.
Things came to a head on day three. To earn immunity, we had been tasked with achieving the highest possible pinball score. After somebody found a way to cheese the game by rhythmically tapping the up key, it became a challenge of endurance rather than skill. I spent hours improving my score—far longer than my manager would care to know. One player said they felt like they were in an episode of Severance: “I heard if we hit 10M points we get a waffle party,” they quipped.
Afterward, my tribe having been comfortably outscored, the talk turned to the impending vote. The simplest option was to eliminate the lowest scorers. But one player, Luke Cannon, proposed the tribe abstain from voting entirely. It was a high-risk, high-reward strategy: In theory, everyone could be spared, but a single vote in the final minutes of the voting period, which lasted an hour, would be enough to eliminate an undeserving player.
The vote began at 8 pm ET, midnight for me. The abstinence strategy lasted all of four minutes before someone received a vote. As panic spread, more votes piled in. Players began to point fingers at one another: It was you, wasn’t it?
