Click start to start the game. You are playing the blue player. The board will appear grey until you flip to learn the state of the board.
You are playing as the blue player. While you, the blue player, always start in control the red player can play a flip and gain control at any time. The state of the board is obscured in grey. You and the red player only learn the state of the game by playing 'flip'. You can gain control by playing flip. The game ends after 10 seconds.
The object of the game is to win as many points as possible. To win you want to be in control for as long as possible using as few flips as possible.
A player gains 100 points per second that that player is in control.
A player loses 100 points when that player plays 'flip'.
The only move available to either the red or the blue player is to play 'flip'. If you are in control and you play 'flip' you remain in control. If you are not in control and you play 'flip' you regain control. One on player can be in control at a time.
The board displays the current known information about the game. Each 'flip' played is marked with a circle. You can only see information that was revealed by your flips. The scores are updated when you play a 'flip' and reveal the current state of the game. Blue rectangles represent periods of time in which you, the blue player, had control. Red rectangles represent periods of time in which the red player was in control. The score is given in the upper left hand corner.
An example game:Lets examine the moves made in the game given above.
The blue player was in control for 2 + 1 = 3 seconds gaining 300 points, playing flip twice costed the blue player 2 * -100 = -200 points, for a total score of 100 points.
The red player was in control for 7 seconds gaining 700 points, playing flip only once at a cost of -100 points, for a total score of 600 points.
The red player having more points than the blue player wins.
FlipIt was invented by Marten van Dijk, Ari Juels, Alina Oprea, and Ronald L. Rivest in the paper FLIPIT: The Game of "Stealthy Takeover".
The game was developed to model Advanced Persistent Threats or APTs and other strategic games of limited information. For example flipIt is very similar to the situations faced by spy agencies and insurgent networks in which members of an network may have been flipped, double crossing the network. Such betrayals will remain unknown to the network until the network actively and at high cost either launches an investigation or flips an enemy agent to learn which friendly agents have been flipped.
This implementation of flipIt was written in javascript and HTML by Ethan Heilman. As of July 2012 this is the only computer implementation of the game. For the source code and further documentation please visit flipIt on github.