How It Works
From the game's perspective, your cabal successfully "implants" a word into the news whenever news articles are found that contain the word's letters spread an equal distance apart within the text. Skip refers to the distance between letters within the same word, because to find that word, you have to skip a certain number of letters (not counting spaces) to find the next letter in that word. Consider our "Fnord" example:
"...indicated that Mr. Felix knows about the ragweed problem in southern Arizona..."
In this example, the skip is 5, because after the 'F' you have to count 5 letters before you get to the next letter in "Fnord."
The larger the skip, the more subtle a word will be, because it's harder to see. Thus, greater skips increase influence, because people don't know that a word is affecting them when they can't consciously perceive the word. Longer words also increase influence. Your cabal's influence benefits most from long words that don't often appear in the plain text of news articles. However, such words should be made up of letters commonly found in news articles so as to maximize the chances of existing within the text. A word's minimum influence will always be 10.
To lead your cabal to world domination, you need to link your cabal to the maximum number of words that lead to the maximum level of influence, much like a stock broker investing in the most promising stocks to increase profit. To establish a link to a word, your cabal spends 100 influence per word, or the current influence value of that word if it's already linked. You may establish one or more links to a single word and you may also establish links to words that someone else has originated, but the higher number of links from different cabals may penalize the influence that the word provides to the first cabal that linked to it.
After establishing links, the game will search for your words in real world news articles. The words may be spread out with a skip from 1 to 30 or reversed, with a skip going backwards in the same range. Reversed words have a higher influence since they are even more obscure to the readers' conscious perceptions.
Sometimes a word's influence isn't as promising as you had hoped for. In these cases, you may sell the word link for half its influence value (much like selling a stock that isn't performing). Additionally, it's worth leveraging a word's exposure from time-to-time. Exposure is based on the number of news articles, out of all the articles, in which the word is printed in plain view; in other words, every article where the word has a skip of 1. While exposure penalizes a word's influence, it's an opportunity to make a "quick buck on a short-term investment" of influence, so to speak. Here's why: you can conceal your links to a specific word while its exposure is low. However, to do this takes some influence, since covering up links is a tricky covert maneuver for your cabal to perform. Then, assuming there's a rise in your word's exposure, you may benefit from a heightened return in influence by revealing the links you had previously concealed.
So, how do I start?
Click here to learn how to begin your quest for world domination
