Instructions for Dekonspira Truth Ladder Game

1—Gather your friends

Get a group of friends together, either physically or online. Or have a party!

2—Break into teams

It could be the four of you in two teams; or a larger group in teams of two or three. Or play alone! 🙂

3—Enjoy your friends and their diversity

If your group is of various political persuasions, you might have fun with two teams: one conservatives and one liberals. Or, in the next game, pair a conservative and a liberal or an independent together across teams to tap into different perspectives and creativity. Or, completely ignore everyone’s political leaning and just enjoy being together and mix it all up!

4—Choose the conspiracy theory

The group can jointly decide on the conspiracy theory to research or you can choose a leader to make that decision.

5— Decide game time limit

Decide the total time all the groups have to research their topic. 

6—Present your evidence when time is up

At the end of the time, the group gets together, and each team will present their evidence; their sources for each piece of evidence; and how reliable they feel their sources are.

7—Teams prove or disprove same conspiracy theory

All teams will research the same conspiracy theory topic. As you get better at the exploration process you might choose a different  conspiracy theory for each team— but often, some conspiracy theories are more (or much more) difficult to prove or disprove than others even though you have super fast data mining capabilities.

8—Start at the bottom of the ladder

Start with the first truth requirement at the bottom rung of the ladder and make your way up, step by step, as you gather sufficient evidence to complete each step.

9— Store what you need to prove for each ladder step

Store the evidence you find in Labs for each step on the ladder— what you are sure you will need and what you might need.

10—Climb the Truth Ladder faster and higher on time!

Use DK’s exploration technology to see which team can get the furthest up the Ladder Of Truth the fastest, during the set time period. 

11—Progressively master DK’s technology!

You will get better and better and faster using the the novel AI Exploration and data mining technology to find, store and sifting through evidence. You will learn how to loop back and forth by mapping and quickly checking your map for people, places or events that provide clues about what happened; quickly reading summaries of articles and re-mapping again; to go more broadly or more narrowly in one direction or another in the web, as the bread crumbs of evidence lead you.

12—Keep brief notes, use diagrams to track plots

Each team may have someone keep brief notes or make a diagram as you go showing connections between different suspects or between pieces of information on their case. You can then log that information into labs for your presentation to the group.

13—Game rule: Use the entire political spectrum!

All teams should use media and data from across the political spectrum. Use the attached political bias chart that we have included to look for different names of media to search. You will generally find that, for a given story, some media may cover it or choose to emphasize aspects of it differently. Even smaller media organizations sometimes find interesting evidence that you may want to consider from the other side of the political spectrum. It may have a different point of view or more in depth coverage on a given story or suspect than others.

14—Rate the reliability of your evidence

You may decide that some of your evidence on a given step is more (or much more) reliable than others. It may be helpful to rank the reliability of each piece of evidence on a scale of 1 to 3 or 1 to 4. Decide in the beginning which evidence ranking system the group will use. 

15— Present your evidence

When time has expired, present your evidence to the other teams for each ladder step and convince them that you found enough to go up to each next step.

16— Decide who won!

Either the leader decides or you decide as a group (which is probably more fun) which team got up the highest on the ladder with the most convincing (or novel)  evidence in the time allowed.

It’s not easy to get to the top of the ladder and to prove to the group that a given topic in fact was not a conspiracy—proved to be the truth; or to prove conclusively that it was a conspiracy. In a given game, when one team or more is able to get to the top of the ladder and prove or disprove a conspiracy— that’s worthy of a CELEBRATION!!  You may want to break out the beer or champagne or the Coke!!

Keep track of your games and conspiracy theory topics over time. New conspiracy theories  show up almost daily or weekly.

Once you get good, you may want to consider playing against a team in other country if you can find one.

Deconspira is available on both Apple and Android operating systems. You can also choose among English, Spanish, French and German languages. 

Enjoy! Remain open minded to new information or approaches, but with appropriate standards for proof. And have fun, as you develop your web exploration skills!

If you have suggestions for improving the game or if you have created your own game and you would like to share, let us know at: