Kiwi Farms

I’m mainly starting this thread to see if anyone remembers a specific book title, but I figure other people can also use it if they run into the same problem.

From what I can remember, it was a young adult book where this kid goes to a beach house for the summer and meets a couple people who invite him to play this board game about different alien races competing to find a winning item. The game had cards that would explain the different aliens and where they come from, and the goal was that whoever found the mystery item would be the only alien race to not have its planet blown up. One of the big twists of the book is the board game is completely real and the people he’s playing with are the same aliens they’re playing as, disguised as humans, and now that the kid agree to play the board game, he’s entered the Earth in the contest to find the Thing or Earth gets blown up and by the end of it, the kid finds the thing(it might have been an AI bit or something) and that the whole “plants except the winner die” thing was made up by the creator so the game would never end. Kid says “fu k this” and releases the Thing into space so the other aliens stop trying to kill him over it.

I remember being really intrigued by it and want to give it another read, even if it ends up not being as good as I remember. Does it ring a bell to anyone?