SUITOR: A MANIFESTO
Mystery Date meets Machiavelli.
Classic romance games end at acquisition. You spin the spinner, open the door, and the Dream appears. Game over. Sweet Valley High let you collect boys like trading cards, no maintenance required.
SUITOR knows better: Anyone can make a reservation. The hard part is holding it.
I. ACQUISITION IS THE EASY PART
The Old World (Mystery Date, Sweet Valley High): You want. You get. You win.
The Reality (SUITOR): You want. You bid. You win. Then you pay. And pay. And pay.
Every six Debuts, the Season ends. Your Conquests expect to be maintained in the manner to which they've grown accustomed. The expectations grow.¹
The winner of an auction often overpays in what is called the Winner's Curse.² In SUITOR, winning the bid is frequently the first step toward Insolvency. The Prospect you fought hardest to acquire becomes the Conquest you cannot afford to keep.
II. YOUR SECRET IS YOUR EDGE
The Old World (Poker, Bridge, et al.): You hide your assets. The table knows what you want (to win) but not what you hold.
The Reality (SUITOR): You show your assets, but hide your desire.
Everyone sees your Conquests and knows what you paid for them, but no one can be sure exactly why you wanted them, This inverts the information asymmetry. Usually, you bluff about your hand. Here, you lie about your identity.³
And because your rivals are doing the same, the game becomes a Keynesian beauty contest: you win not merely by acquiring what you want, but by predicting what others want and thwarting them.⁴ When a rival bids aggressively on the Jack of Clubs, you must ask employ K-level thinking to determine why.
Patrons sometimes acquire camouflage in the form of flesh to conceal the one acquisition that might expose them. This is not shame. This is market strategy. The auction is not about price discovery. It is about mind-reading.
The secret is not what you're hiding from. The secret is what you're protecting.
III. THE COST OF BEING WRONG IN PUBLIC
The Old World (most bluffing games): If you catch a liar, you are rewarded. If you accuse falsely, you suffer a penalty. The math is bilateral: accuser and accused, winner and loser.
The Reality (SUITOR): If you catch a liar, the liar suffers a Scandal and loses their bid. Justice is served. But if you accuse falsely, something far worse happens.
The falsely accused wins immediately. They take the Prospect at their stated price. The auction ends. The others at the table may have been counting on that card, might have needed that Prospect. But you murdered that dream.
Your false accusation did not merely cost you. It cost everyone else at the table.⁵
Every third-grader understands this dynamic. One child speaks out of turn; the teacher cancels recess for the entire class. The transgressor did not intend to harm their classmates. They were selfish, impulsive, not thinking of consequences beyond themselves. But the consequences land on the innocent anyway.
Developmental psychologists have studied this precisely. When one child's actions cause the group to lose a privilege, peers direct their resentment not at the authority figure but at the transgressor.
SUITOR weaponizes this dynamic.
Game designers typically balance mechanics through expected value calculations. SUITOR balances this one socially. The Scandal you receive is survivable. The memory of the player whose Perfect Match you handed to a rival through your reckless accusation? Incalculable.
Table Hate is not measured in points.
IV. THE INSURGENCY OF THE MIDDLE
The Old World (most competitive games): Victory compounds. The leader extends their lead. The rich get richer until the outcome is inevitable.
The Reality (SUITOR): The leader gets status. Everyone else gets cash.
At Season's End, the Dowry—every card paid in every auction—is redistributed. The Patron with the largest Entourage earns first pick: one card of their choosing. A trophy. A flex. But the rest of the Dowry is dealt face-down to everyone else.⁶
The leader gains a positional good. The masses gain liquidity. And liquidity wins auctions.
This is not charity. It is arms distribution. The middle players now hold the ammunition to outbid the leader in the next Season. The leader's visible success has purchased invisible vulnerability.
To lead is to become illiquid. To chase is to become dangerous.
The Wallflower: The Patron with no Conquests collects nothing. You cannot abstain from the market and still benefit from its activity.⁷ Participation is the price of inheritance.
THE POINT
Mystery Date trains optimists: open the door, hope for the Dream.
Sweet Valley High trains collectors: acquire, display, repeat.
Suitor trains operators: win the auction, survive the bill, and never let them know what you actually wanted.
In the twenty-first century, romance is not a fairy tale.
It is a carrying cost.
FOUNDATIONS
¹ Switching Costs & Lock-In (Klemperer, 1987). Once invested, exit is expensive. Upkeep formalizes the ongoing cost of retention; Insolvency formalizes the cost of exit. The economic literature on lock-in describes how initial commitments create path dependencies. Each Conquest narrows your future options.
² The Winner's Curse (Thaler, 1988). In common-value auctions, the winner is often the bidder who most overestimated the asset's worth. In SUITOR, aggressive bidding depletes the Treasury that Upkeep demands. Victory and Insolvency are frequently the same hand.
³ Preference Falsification (Kuran, 1995). The act of misrepresenting one's preferences under perceived social pressure. Kuran's work examined political and social contexts; SUITOR applies the principle to romantic acquisition. You must falsify your Appetites to prevent rivals from holding your desires hostage.
⁴ Keynesian Beauty Contest (Keynes, 1936; Nagel, 1995). Keynes described stock markets as beauty contests where judges vote not for the prettiest face, but for the face they predict others will find prettiest. SUITOR literalizes this: you win not by satisfying your own preferences, but by anticipating and blocking your rivals' preferences. Nagel's experimental work on k-level reasoning applies directly—each player must model the depth of strategic thinking at the table.
⁵ Collective Punishment & Third-Party Harm (Thomas, Kelsey & Vaish, 2024). "No one is going to recess": when one child's actions cause the entire class to lose a privilege, peers direct their resentment not at the teacher but at the transgressor. The child becomes a scapegoat, shamed before classmates who had no part in the offense. SUITOR weaponizes this dynamic. A false accusation punishes every Patron at the table, and they will remember who cost them.
⁶ Positional Goods & Relative Standing (Hirsch, 1976). Some goods derive value not from intrinsic utility but from their scarcity relative to what others possess. The leader's first-pick privilege is purely positional—a visible marker of dominance. But positional goods cannot be spent. The masses receive fungible wealth: less prestigious, more powerful. Hirsch argued that as societies grow wealthier, competition for positional goods intensifies while their supply remains fixed. SUITOR models this tension at the table: do you want to look rich, or do you want to win?
⁷ The Logic of Collective Action (Olson, 1965). Olson identified the Free Rider Problem: rational actors will not contribute to collective efforts if they can benefit without cost. SUITOR solves this brutally. The Dowry exists because Patrons paid into it through auctions. Wallflowers—who bid on nothing, won nothing, contributed nothing—are excluded from its redistribution entirely. There is no dividend for those who shorted the market.
Black Market Games | Ludic relics for a post-ethical world.
suitor.vip | blackmarket.games
© 2025. Made in the USA.
WOO. LIE. SURVIVE.