The Dilemmas Game

Flex your moral muscles in this game of 52 everyday dilemmas

In life, we are regularly faced with dilemmas: complex moral problems for which there are no obvious answers. When a friend confesses to having an affair, do we keep their secret? When a colleague has terrible breath, do we let them know? When a stranger is crying on the bus, do we offer comfort or keep our distance? In such moments, we long for some good advice to help us find a way forward.

The Dilemmas Game invites you to flex your moral muscles and compare your problem-solving skills with those of your friends and family. Players must propose different solutions to 52 common dilemmas, using analogies or drawing on real-life experiences to explain their answers. It’s a fun and enlightening way of practising for the inevitable quandaries of life.

The cards cover five categories:

• Relationships
• Work
• Sociability
• Family
• Leisure

Dilemmas include:

• Your close friend has confessed to you that they are cheating on their partner, with whom you are also close. You have been sworn to secrecy, but you hate being a party to their deception. Whichever course you choose will mean betraying a friendship. What would you do?
• You’ve been offered a prestigious job at a large multinational company. It’s your ideal role at an increased salary, but the company has a chequered record, having been implicated in several humanitarian disasters in underdeveloped countries. What would you do?
• An old friend you have not seen in several years calls you up to say that they need you to lend them a high but ultimately manageable sum of money to help cover the cost of their mother’s funeral. Although they may well be telling the truth, your knowledge of their slightly chaotic past makes you suspect they may have another purpose in mind. What would you do?

1. The aim of this game is to give good advice – wise, compelling and above all useful suggestions for solving a series of common dilemmas. In this game, whoever gives the best advice wins.

2. Players should agree on how many rounds they wish to play. We suggest a multiple of the number of players involved; for example, 4 players would mean 4, 8 or 12 rounds (everyone then gets an equal number of turns).

3. Choose someone to be the ‘Questioner’ for the first turn. Shuffle the deck of Dilemmas cards and place it on the table, dilemmas side down.

4. The Questioner takes the top card and poses a given dilemma to the group. Working clockwise, each player gives their advice in turn. What counts is to be convincing, interesting and alive to, and wise about, the real difficulties in the dilemma. Players might consider using analogies, or drawing on real-life experiences to explain their proposed response.

5. Once everyone has given their perspective, the Questioner chooses which player they felt gave the best advice for solving the dilemma. This will, of course, be a subjective judgement; the Questioner is free to choose the criteria with which they assess the quality of advice. They might pick the answer they found most useful, the most compassionate, or perhaps the most original. The player who is judged to have given the best advice gets to keep the Dilemmas card.

6. After the winner of the turn has been chosen, the player sitting clockwise from the Questioner will take a card and pose the next dilemma.

7. At the end of the game, the player who has collected the most Dilemmas cards will have offered the best advice, and will therefore be crowned the winner.