A million users isn’t cool. You know what is?
My social network was booming. I had attracted top-tier users: the coveted Trendsetter, the popularity-lured Investor. I had bested server problems and bad press. Then, somebody picked a particularly unlucky card out of the One Billion Users deck I was testing. Sixty seconds later, I had lost it all.
One Billion Users is a new card game from Techdirt and Diegetic Games, and at its best, it lends itself to moments like this. Currently in its last days on Kickstarter, intended to fund a single run of the game rather than a wide release, it’s the latest in a string of projects from the team-up — including the digital games Moderator Mayhem and Trust & Safety Tycoon as well as CIA: Collect It All, a card game built on real CIA training materials.
One Billion Users is a lot less nerdy than any of these. It’s inspired by the relatively simple 1906 racing-themed card game Touring, better known through a popular 1950s adaptation called Mille Bornes. Only, instead of trying to drive the fastest while sandbagging competitors, you’re trying to build the biggest social network while sabotaging everyone else.
The game, for two to four players, involves drawing and playing cards that will either help build your own social platform or stop someone else from growing theirs. The most basic is a “community” card, which represents a number of users joining a platform. Since the goal is to outpace everyone else’s growth, you can also play “blocker” cards (like “low on funds” or “server overload”) on an opponent’s network, either limiting or completely stopping them from putting down community cards. If a blocker is played on you, you can resolve it by playing a “hotfix” card (“server upgrade,” for instance) or sacrificing a certain number of other cards.
Techdirt founder Mike Masnick says that while mulling a follow-up to the CIA card game, he was inspired by playing Mille Bornes with his family, then discovering its public domain predecessor Touring. The team considered a few different themes — “espionage, cryptocurrency, AI, and even the general worship of tech entrepreneurs,” Masnick says. They settled on social networks, and One Billion Users was born.
Admittedly, most networks don’t — as far as the public knows — spend a lot of time trying to literally break competitors’ sites. But while the blocker system mostly grew out of its source material, Masnick still says it “generally felt realistic in tone,” particularly as companies try to capitalize on each other’s problems. (Masnick sits on the board of Bluesky, which has recently lured millions of Twitter refugees by doing exactly that.) And in the game’s defense, remember when Facebook and Twitter started sabotaging each other’s friend-finding tools?
One Billion Users’ core formula is very similar to Touring and Mille Bornes — you’re adding users instead of mileage, playing blockers instead of car breakdowns, and resolving them with hotfixes instead of things like spare tires. But the game adds a few major, thematically appropriate mechanics.
The first big change is a mechanic called “toxicity.” Every community card in your network adds a varying amount of it, and if your ratio of toxicity to users at the end of the game is too high, you’ll be penalized. It also matters occasionally throughout the game: a “toxic culture” blocker, for instance, means you can only add highly toxic community cards to your network.
The second is influencers: cards representing big-time users with dedicated communities, which are drawn and automatically handed to the player who meets their condition. Common conditions include joining the biggest or smallest network, but there are more idiosyncratic ones, like the Contrarian, who’s drawn to the most toxic network. Players can steal influencers from each other, essentially conducting the card game version of Microsoft’s Mixer signing Ninja.
Another added bit of complexity are “event” cards, which either temporarily change the rules of play or require everyone to take an action. That unlucky card above, for instance, forced every influencer to reevaluate which network they were joining… and it turned out, my community no longer served their needs.
Where Trust & Safety Tycoon is a pretty rigorous (if tongue-in-cheek) attempt to convey how hard running a social network is, One Billion Users is far more impressionistic. Its cards hold some commentary on social media and the tech industry, but its appeal remains very similar to the satisfaction of screwing over other drivers with road hazards. Conversely, if you’ve experienced the frustration of being constantly stalled by hazards in Mille Bornes, One Billion Users makes it easier to fix them — but my play group still frequently got stuck in doldrums.
My playthroughs of One Billion Users varied heavily based on how the deck was stacked. It was possible to end up with a fun balance of growth and sabotage. It was also easy to end up with a hand stuffed with hotfix cards during numerous rounds where nobody was playing blockers or a bunch of influencer-stealing cards in a game where none of the influencers had yet appeared. Also, nobody I played with wanted to tally its fairly complex points system at the end, including the toxicity penalty. (There’s an optional mechanic that adds extra conditions themed after specific networks — it’s a fun idea, but also even more tallying.) On our internet, whoever signed up the most users won, quality of life be damned.
One Billion Users’ exact rules are still in flux, and it’s possible some of this will change. But ultimately, as a longtime spectator of social media shenanigans, my favorite part was deciding which social network I was building. My influencer-filled stronghold? The golden age of Twitter. Its sad, empty shell? Now I was running X.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one doing that. “I find it interesting to see how networks in the game pretty quickly develop a kind of culture,” Masnick says. One of his testers, a high schooler, realized midway through the game that his network was hopelessly and intractably toxic. His response, announced to the rest of the table as he embraced the chaos? “He was ‘going full Reddit.’”
