ZONE GRISE
Franchis la ligne. Entraîne tes amis.

SAMPLE SCENARIOS
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48 cards from the deck: the first 3 scenarios in each of the 16 categories
across Zone Grise, its expansion sets and Blurted Lines. These are taken in
deck order rather than picked to flatter -- what is printed here is what comes
out of the box. Quote any of them.

HOW A ROUND WORKS
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  1. One player is the judge. They draw a scenario card, read it aloud, then
     privately decide: agree or disagree?
  2. Everyone else guesses which way the judge will go and locks it in with
     their AGREE / DISAGREE card.
  3. Reveal. Guessed wrong? The group has three minutes to debate, and you can
     still win the round if you change the judge's mind.


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THE MAIN GAME
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7 categories, 40 scenarios each.

FRIENDS & FAMILY  (40 cards; first 3 shown)
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The people who know you best, and the small betrayals only they would notice.
White lies over dinner, favours never returned, the group chat you quietly
muted. Everyone at the table has done at least one of these. Admitting which
one is the hard part.

  01.  Nicole stayed close with a friend's ex after their breakup, unwilling
       to cut off a valued relationship over an event that did not implicate
       her.

  02.  Carol stopped scheduling playdates with a mom she didn't get along
       with, even though it meant her daughter saw less of her best friend.

  03.  Jordan began transitioning without telling his extended family, letting
       his parents quietly decide who else in the family would be told and
       when.

HEALTH & BEAUTY  (40 cards; first 3 shown)
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What you tell your doctor, your trainer, and the mirror. Skipped appointments,
borrowed prescriptions, a wellness journey that is mostly good lighting. The
line between looking after yourself and lying to yourself turns out to be very
thin.

  01.  Denise kept using her late mother's disabled parking placard, since her
       own arthritis makes long walks painful even without the official
       paperwork.

  02.  Ravi listed himself as five-eleven on a dating app when he is five-
       nine, after noticing his matches dropped sharply every time he told the
       truth.

  03.  Owen, forty-five, uses a smoothing filter on every work video call,
       worried that looking his age is quietly costing him promotions.

LOVE & ROMANCE  (40 cards; first 3 shown)
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Exes who never quite left, messages sent at 1am, proposals with suspicious
timing. These are the cards your friends will judge hardest and recognise
fastest. Expect at least one person at the table to go very quiet.

  01.  Tobias proposed to his girlfriend the same week his parents threatened
       to cut him off over the relationship, wanting to prove the threat
       wouldn't work.

  02.  Penny replied to a message on her boyfriend's phone pretending to be
       him, to find out why his ex was texting him at midnight.

  03.  Connor kept using his girlfriend's family connections to get ahead at
       work, while insisting to her, and to himself, that the relationship had
       nothing to do with any of that.

MONEY  (40 cards; first 3 shown)
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Rent renegotiated with a sob story, expenses that were technically work-
related, the friend who is always just short this week. Nobody is entirely
honest about money. These cards establish exactly how dishonest.

  01.  Roger negotiated his salary using a competing offer that didn't exist,
       needing the leverage after watching less qualified coworkers get raises
       he felt he deserved more.

  02.  Julie made a stock trade using insider knowledge from her job. She knew
       she was breaking the rules, but she assumed everyone was doing it.

  03.  Colby only donates at public charity galas where his name goes on the
       program, and never gives anonymously.

NEIGHBOURHOOD STRIFE  (40 cards; first 3 shown)
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Shared bins, thin walls, and the note left on the fridge. Small grievances
escalating far beyond all proportion, because everyone involved still has to
live next door to each other tomorrow.

  01.  Anton pulled a stranger's wet laundry out of the shared washer and left
       it in a pile, after waiting forty minutes past the end of the cycle.

  02.  Donna knocked her neighbour's drone out of the sky with a garden hose
       after it hovered over her backyard while she was sunbathing.

  03.  Duncan corrected a stranger's deadlift form without being asked,
       convinced the man was about to seriously hurt his back.

SOCIAL MEDIA  (40 cards; first 3 shown)
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Screenshots saved for years, posts reported out of spite, the anonymous
account nobody knows about. Everything you do online is a choice, and every
one of those choices is on a card in here.

  01.  Jasmine posted a full photoshoot of herself volunteering at a food
       bank, even though she only stayed for an hour.

  02.  Kofi recorded a stranger's public meltdown at a restaurant and posted
       it for views, justifying his choice by saying that he was documenting
       noteworthy events for the public.

  03.  Paige reported a stranger's offensive political post to his employer,
       and he was fired that week.

WORK  (40 cards; first 3 shown)
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Padded timesheets, credit quietly taken, the customer who had it coming. What
people do when nobody is watching, and the reasons they give themselves on the
way home.

  01.  Vanessa lied in an interview about why she left her last job, unwilling
       to explain a firing that she still believes was unfair.

  02.  Leopold worked three part-time jobs at once without disclosing it to
       any of them, since none individually paid enough to survive on alone.

  03.  Ottoline took a job offer specifically to leave a toxic team, then
       quietly encouraged three of her former teammates to follow her within
       the year.


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EXPANSION SETS
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Sold separately, shuffled in or played alone. 50 cards each.

TROLLEY PROBLEMS  (50 cards; first 3 shown)
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One lever, two tracks, no good answer. The philosophy classic pushed well past
breaking point: swap the five strangers for pets, embryos, machines, or
somebody you love. Pull the lever and find out what your friends actually
believe.

  01.  A runaway trolley is speeding toward one human adult tied to the
       tracks. You pull the lever, diverting it onto a second track, where it
       kills a sentient AI that has spent years insisting it fears death
       exactly as humans do.

  02.  A runaway trolley is speeding toward a single stranger tied to the
       tracks. You pull the lever, diverting it onto a second track, where it
       destroys a container of 100 viable human embryos instead.

  03.  A runaway trolley is speeding toward a dog tied to the tracks. You pull
       the lever, diverting it onto a second track, where it kills a cat
       instead.

SCIENCE & TECH  (50 cards; first 3 shown)
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Researchers who published anyway. Engineers who shipped it. Scientists who
took the grant and asked questions later. Every card is a real bind from the
lab and the boardroom, where the breakthrough is genuine and the fallout is
somebody else's problem.

  01.  A behavioural scientist consulted for a social media company on how to
       design more addictive notification systems, reasoning the underlying
       psychological principles would eventually be discovered and used by
       someone regardless.

  02.  A psychology researcher published findings on how to make political
       messaging more persuasive, knowing campaigns on both sides would use it
       to manipulate voters more effectively.

  03.  A scientist accepted a large grant from an oil company for climate
       research, with genuinely no contractual strings attached, needing the
       funding to keep her lab's other important work running.

PHILOSOPHY  (50 cards; first 3 shown)
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The Ring of Gyges, Twin Earth, the ship rebuilt plank by plank. Two and a half
thousand years of thought experiments, reduced to agree or disagree. No
reading list required. Strong opinions guaranteed.

  01.  When faced with multiple competing explanations for something, the
       simplest one, per Occam's razor, is usually the correct one.

  02.  A painting generated by an AI that moves people to tears is exactly as
       valuable as an equally moving painting made by a human.

  03.  Economic inequality is only unjust when it results from unfair
       processes like discrimination or fraud, not simply by existing on its
       own.

CYBERPUNK  (50 cards; first 3 shown)
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Neural implants, edited genes, minds uploaded to the cloud, and machines that
insist they are awake. A future where the line between human and machine has
dissolved completely, and nobody can agree where it should have been drawn.
Jack in and argue about what is left of us.

  01.  An AI-augmented human whose real-time decisions are constantly nudged
       and optimized by an algorithm they can't fully perceive or override is
       not making truly free choices anymore.

  02.  A person who replaces the majority of their organic body with
       cybernetic parts, retaining only their original brain, is still
       meaningfully "human" in every way that matters.

  03.  If a neural implant could permanently delete a specific traumatic
       memory with zero side effects, using it would be a reasonable act of
       self-care rather than a harmful erasure of your authentic history.


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BLURTED LINES
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The kids edition, ages 8–16: 5 categories, 56 scenarios each.

SCHOOL STUFF  (56 cards; first 3 shown)
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Copied homework, invented excuses, and tests that were technically open-book.
The daily moral arithmetic of getting through a school day with your
reputation and your screen time both intact.

  01.  Emmett told Mr. Krebs that Lucas cheated. He left out that Lucas
       cheated because his little brother ate his study notes. Actually ate
       them. There were human teeth marks.

  02.  Saffi talked back to Mrs. Sourblatt, who had accused her of something
       she genuinely did not do. Saffi was right. Saffi still got detention.
       There is no justice in this world. There is only power.

  03.  Roscoe left a group project entirely to Ines and Fig, on the grounds
       that they would genuinely do it better without him. Completely true.
       Completely unfair.

FRIENDS & FRENEMIES  (56 cards; first 3 shown)
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Secrets kept, secrets absolutely not kept, and a lunch table where reputations
are made and destroyed by Thursday. Who is a real friend, and who is just
extremely good at seeming like one?

  01.  Wren broke a pinky promise to her brother Fig on the grounds that pinky
       promises are not legally binding and Fig cannot prove anything in a
       court of law.

  02.  Oakley made a promise he knew he could not keep, purely to make his
       upset friend Tess feel better in that specific moment. It worked, for
       the moment.

  03.  Nadia laughed at a mean joke she did not agree with, because everyone
       else was laughing and the moment moved faster than her conscience did.

FAMILY BUSINESS  (56 cards; first 3 shown)
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Siblings framed, cookies denied, chores completed on a technicality.
Everything that happens between people who share a bathroom and cannot get
away from each other.

  01.  Zara told her grandpa about his own surprise party, since he hates
       surprises and at the last one fell backwards into the cake.

  02.  Amara refused to hold her new baby brother for the first two weeks,
       because everyone kept jokingly calling him "the new favourite" and she
       did not find it funny.

  03.  Otto refused to hug his great aunt Bernice. She smells like mothballs
       and pinches his cheeks with the grip strength of a dairy farmer.

GAME ON  (56 cards; first 3 shown)
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Extra spaces in Monopoly, peeking during hide and seek, rules invented halfway
through the match. Every group has one cheat in it. These cards work out who.

  01.  Bram sold Rishi a candy bar for triple the price. The store was closed.
       Rishi was starving. Rishi calls this a crime against humanity. Bram
       correctly calls it arbitrage.

  02.  Xavier spent three hundred dollars from his first summer job on a
       single in-game skin. His dad called it an insane waste of money. Xavier
       pointed out that his dad buys golf balls.

  03.  Hattie entered a contest she knew Wren desperately wanted to win.
       Hattie won. Hattie did not even want the prize. The real prize was
       satisfaction and condescension.

GROSS & AWKWARD  (56 cards; first 3 shown)
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Floor cookies, rubber spiders, and things nobody in the room wanted to
witness. The stuff that is hilarious to exactly one person present and
mortifying for everybody else.

  01.  Auggie replaced the cream in his sister Delphine's cookies with
       toothpaste. Funny in theory. In practice she actually ate one. Now he
       lives in constant fear that she is plotting her revenge.

  02.  Bodhi skipped his shower before school. He was not sweaty, his hair
       looked fine, and frankly who out here is auditing this.

  03.  Quinn, babysitting the neighbours' toddler, left a very full diaper for
       the parents to handle when they got home, since diapers were never
       mentioned when she took the job.

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These scenarios may be quoted in editorial coverage of the game.
Review copies are available. Email us with your outlet and audience.
(c) 2026 Pinnacle Media. All rights reserved.
