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“This time,” Cenz said, “We shall play according to Alchiban IV rules.”
“An interesting decision,” Y replied, accessing all of his files on the obscure ruleset.
Cenz did not pick it to attempt to throw him off; the game of Epochs was already incredibly intricate, and each possible formulation added only minor twists. And they both knew the game by heart.
But it was a variant they had rarely played. Something unexpected, bringing a spice to life, Y thought.
The game was already far too complex for any but highly-augmented human minds to grasp. Executive Commander Urle was known to play with them, though he was still a novice in comparison.
And the pace of their play was swift. A half-dozen rounds of folds, stalemates, card-drawing and sacrificing flew by in less than a minute.
It was, as was often the case, a very close game.
Y calculated that he had the edge. Cenz surely knew this, but he also knew how to exploit Y’s seeming advantage in myriad ways. Would he go immensely bold and stick to honesty with his hand? Or would he attempt to bluff?
While many beings had tells that would be instantly obvious to Y, reading only a handful of polyps out of the current ninety-eight Cenz was composed of simply gave too few data points to judge from. Thus, that avenue was neatly closed to him.
He ran the numbers of past games, but Cenz was too clever for this, as well; relying not on a single mind but a union of many, there were unpredictable variances and spikes in the data as he allowed one or another polyp to make final decisions.
How enjoyable this was!
He played a card and bumped the temperature back up.
Which was what Y wanted; to win in this game, the ambient temperature of the universe (not a literal temperature in a literal universe, merely a number based on the current turn and cards previously sacrificed to raise or lower it – put into a pile referred to as the universe), when combined with the temperature of your hand would have to match one of several significant numbers, such as absolute zero or Planck’s constant. The winning numbers only need be constant and important, not truly temperatures.
Each round, the universe cooled according to a formula that could be tweaked in different versions of the games, bringing different strategies to the fore.
Though invented by the Belerre, an SU member species who had shed their physical bodies in place of digital consciousness, some digits had been later added to the game by others.
The Polyps had put in a number related to their number of data-carrier sets in their genetic system, and Humans had put in 42, though most serious versions of the game did not include that one.
His kind had not seen fit to mar the otherwise perfectly observational beauty of the system by adding or subtracting any significant numbers.

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