Subterfuge

Subterfuge is a week-long multiplayer game of strategy, diplomacy, and betrayal that plays out in real time. Check in for ten minutes, a few times a day: read the sonar, schedule your orders, and reply to the ally who insists the fleet massing on your border is "purely defensive." Then close the game and get on with your day while your plans execute.

On PC at last with cross-play into a community that has been running continuously since 2015.

Drive the Time Machine

Drag the Time Machine forward and watch tomorrow unfold. See where every visible sub will be, how combat resolves, and what your factories will have produced by Thursday. Then, schedule your own orders to execute at any moment, hours or days ahead. Launch the invasion at 4:12 a.m. without setting an alarm but remember everyone else has a Time Machine too.

Depth that fits around your life

A game of Subterfuge lasts a week or more, but a session lasts minutes. It was designed by two new parents who wanted Diplomacy-grade scheming without giving up their evenings. The strategy happens in your head and on your schedule.

The real map is the other players

Every alliance, border pact, joint strike, and deception in Subterfuge happens in chat. None of it is enforced by the game. A treaty is worth exactly as much as the person who signed it, intel is worth exactly as much as its source, and the player feeding you sonar reports may be feeding your rival the same. Winning means reading people as sharply as you read the map.

No dice. No luck. Only people.

The Time Machine can show you tomorrow because there is no randomness. Every battle can be forecast down to the last driller before it happens. Recruit powerful specialists to tilt the math and bend the rules. The only truly unknowable variable in Subterfuge is human intention.

Community Crossplay Since 2015

Join a cross-platform player pool that has kept Subterfuge alive and updated for over a decade. Play the same game from your desk and your phone. Open the war room on a second monitor at work, then answer a treacherous counter-offer from the school pickup line.

A typical week

• Day 1: Nine polite introductions. Four proposed alliances. One of them is sincere.
  
• Day 2: You and your neighbor agree to keep borders demilitarized. You both start counting drillers.
  
• Day 4: Your ally proposes a joint strike on the olive. Olive has just proposed the same about your ally.
  
• Day 5: Drill a mine. Sonar picks up a "defensive" fleet drifting towards it, thirty hours out. Plenty of time. You schedule your counter, draft two very different messages, and head to lunch.
  
• Day 6: The trap you scheduled yesterday ago springs mid-meeting, exactly as planned. You watch it from your desk and say nothing.
  
• Day 7: Trap closed. Olive's mine captured.
  
• Day 8: Victory. Your former ally sends a simple message: "Well played. Rematch?"