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Real money betting game Cordial Minuet is out now

Win real gold amulets in peculiar contest.

Passage and The Castle Doctrine developer Jason Rohrer's bizarre betting-for-real-money game, Cordial Minuet, is out now for PC, Mac and Linux.

We've covered Cordial Minuet, and many queries surround it, before when I interviewed Rohrer about the peculiar project in November. Here's an overview of how it plays:

Watch on YouTube

In honour of its launch, Rohrer has created a strange contest around it. "I'm giving away 12 occult amulets that cast myself out of pure gold, silver, and copper" he told me in an email. "I carved them out of wax, made plaster molds out of the wax, and then hurled molten metal into the molds with a casting centrifuge, and then hand polished all of them."

Some of these prizes are worth their weight in gold. Because they're made of gold.

"I've also got a collusion-proof contest set up that took too many months to devise," he added. "You win points by playing against a secret cabal of chosen players who will be active during the contest."

So here's how it works: Each day for the game's first 12 days on the market someone will win an amulet. These are won by scoring more points against secret Cabal Members than anyone else. How do you know who's a Cabal Member? You don't. That's why its a secret, silly.

A couple of rules: No one can win more than one amulet. Only 12 amulets were forged and that's how many people Rohrer intends to take a piece of this weirdly valuable memorabilia.

There will be cash prizes too. The first place winner for the day will receive an amulet and somewhere between $50-$200. The second place winner will receive $20, then third and fourth place will get $10 each.

Each day the contest will begin at midnight PST (so 8am UK time).

Rohrer clarified to me that Cabal Members will be alerted to their status as such, but they won't know who the other Cabal Members are. "They are hand-selected by me for secret reasons," Rohrer explained. "Also, I am one of them. It was originally going to be just me that you can score points against, but in testing, there simply wasn't enough of me to go around. So I recruited a cabal."

Cabal Members will still be eligible for prizes, however. "Because they don't know who their fellow cabal colleagues are, they are each participants in the contest too (albeit at a slight disadvantage, because there's one less cabal member they can score points against - themselves)," Rohrer added.

Furthermore, Rohrer noted that "each amulet comes with a unique and partial secret on the back." What could it mean?

Cordial Minuet has an ominous occult theme tied around it to signify the olde bond between religion and betting.Watch on YouTube