They must trade knowledge with each other in order to try to gain enough knowledge for the "mind combat" that takes place every night, which is basically a fancy Rock, Paper, Scissors game that depends on the aura counts for the players involved.

If the player clicks and holds the mouse button on an icon (the game's abstraction of a word), one can see its meaning.

"Siboot", the name of the first Shepherd, is a reversal of the syllables of "Bootsie", a cat which Crawford had.

Crawford suffered much grief while contemplating that he was unable to talk to Bootsie in order to try to comfort him before he had to be put down.

One day while pondering this, Crawford had a flash of insight: his next game would be Talk to the Animals, which evolved into the very different Trust & Betrayal.

[6] In 2013 Crawford publicly released the source code of several of his games, including Trust & Betrayal.

[11] In January 2013, Crawford began work on a redesigned version of Siboot, borrowing the world and premise of the 1987 game and taking advantage of advances in computer power.