Among Us, made in 2018, is perhaps the most popular and successful games of 2020. After catapulting on the gaming scene and racking in nearly 4 million dollars, the game of lying, murdering, and detective work has made us all double as both Sherlock Holmes and Ted Bundy. (As a side note, I'd love to see inmates play Among Us with detectives or FBI agents)

Anywho, now Among Us is far from being the first lying/deception game (I mean what would Vegas be with that?) so here's a list of my favorite games and movies to trigger every trust issue you've ever had.

1) So Long Suckers

John Nash, known for receiving the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, fathered Game Theory and the lovely board game, So Long Suckers. For about 1 hour, four players try to cheat each other out of playing pieces by forming and breaking coalitions. Each player starts with 7 counters with every person holding a different color. You're out once you lose all your counters and people refuse to give you any more. You can gift or trade counters to other people. Someone is randomly chosen to start the game by putting one piece into the center but he/she will choose the next player. To capture all the counters, you can team up with someone else to stack two consecutive colored chips down. For example, if blue and red team up, blue can gift one counter to red, place a blue chip down and tell red to go next. Red can then place that gifted blue chip down and capture the stack. He/she must then chose to kill one chip, removing it from the game. Then, they can choose to reimburse blue with some chips or severe the relationship and keep everything to themselves since he would've captured multiple colors of chips from the stack.

2) The Movie Circle

The Netflix thriller, Circle, takes place in a circular room of 50 abducted humans, each standing on a circle. They cannot leave the circle or touch anyone or else they'll be tasered (and killed). Every two minutes, they can discretely vote to taser someone. It seems to be an alien experiment to see what demographic humans value the most since there are people of all ages, races, and jobs within the group. The "winner" must be the last one standing. However, since ties must be broken, one of the last two people standing must elect not to vote. This seems like an extreme twist of among us. Anywho, YouTuber Nerd Explains showed how the optimal way of winning was to stay quiet and not outwardly nominate one individual to be killed. The winner of the game *spoiler alert* does just that and really only states that the young child and pregnant lady should be spared. In doing so, he gained their trust and ultimately he became the final three with the two. The child and him agree to step off their circles in self-sacrifice to spare the pregnant lady but he casts a last-minute vote to taser the latter. I guess now we found a strategy for playing among us though - don't be aggressive while talking.

3) Liar's Dice

Admittedly, I found this game from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean but still, it's a brilliant one. Players must guess the total number of dice with a certain value. For example, 4 threes would be dice total dice showing the number three. Bets must increase by value (going from 4 threes to 4 fours) or number (going from 4 threes to 5 threes). Ones are wild so they'll count for whatever number you want (so 4 threes could technically be 2 threes and 2 ones). The game ends when a player challenges, at which point all dice are revealed. The challenger loses if they're wrong and the "liar" loses if they had indeed, lied. Of course this is a game of probability and luck just as much as it is about lying and deception though.