Mini 291: Clue Mafia.....Game Over!

[EmpTyger]

bigAl:
Sorry, I’m biting my tongue out of final deference to the mod. Because I’d *really* like to hear what she has to say next. I just couldn’t resist paralleling kops’s death post.

Also, since it’s moot now, and I’m egotistically curious: would you mind letting me know how on earth you decided to vote me over Flay?

[Mr. Flay]

You played a very good game, EmpTyger; I had my doubts right up until the final night. All of you did.

My only question is, why did you guys cut Tamuz loose D3? We were getting our asses kicked up until that point...

I'll go poke Orb and tell her we finally made a decision....

[kops]

I

didn't, and I still think it was a bad choice b/c I don't think anybody else would have even noticed the contradiction... but oh well.

[Orbiting]

The three remaining players look around for a weapon, any weapon. Someone has to die today... At last, BigAl discovers a horseshoe nailed handily above a door....

"A horseshoe?, " asks EmpTyger. "What kind of weapon is that?"

"Millions of Clue:Master Detective players have asked the same question, you scummy scum-type person," BigAl replied.

Then, there was a CLANG!, and EmpTyger was clever no more.

EmpTyger, Sgt. Grey, who was, as you all now know, scum, is lynched Day Five. Game over, town wins!

Mechanics post to come. Watch this space. Or, rather a space somewhere below this on the page.

[Orbiting]

The Story of Clue Mafia:

I had this idea for a room-based mechanic set that would avoid issues like one player always getting killed or investigated Night One, etc. This was my test game, so I will describe the mechanic below, and I would love to get some feedback on how you thought it worked.

First off, the Clue theme. The Clue theme was ideal for what I wanted to do, because it had a small set of potential characters (any of which could potentially be scum), and a small set of rooms (each of which had a name). There are basically 10 suspect characters in the Clue universe (there are a few more, but they are variants of the main 10). In the game, one is chosen secretly and at random, to be the murderer. Here, I did the same thing. I randomly chose three characters to be scum roles, one to be a passive doc, and one to be a sort of hunter character with limited cop and vig abilities. I then randomly assigned roles to players.

Each night, the players were to choose a room. I mentally represented the nine rooms as slots in which one might stack checkers (because I tend to think in terms of board games). When a player sent a PM telling me what room he was going to, I added one checker to that room's stack. All moves were resolved chronologically in order of PM recieved. If you were a town-aligned player in a room, you were vulnerable to nightkill by scum if and only if you were the top checker in the stack.

If townie A were in the Library, and scum B came into the library, B would kill A. If, in another scenario, townie C was in the Billiard Room, and then townie D entered, townie C would be safe -- if scum E entered, E would kill D. For balance reasons, only the first scum to enter a room with an unprotected townie would get a kill. If the first person in a room were a scum, (which seemed unlikely, as scum would most likely take longer to send PMs, since they could talk at night), then the first townie to enter that room would be the targetable player.

The two town power roles could upset the dynamic a bit. The doctor role, which was assigned to the socialite Mrs. Peacock in this game, would protect everyone else in the room with him/her. But, s/he could not protect him/herself. If the doc was in the vulnerable spot at the top of the stack when a scum came in, the doc would die. This was how Bamboomancer was killed.

The hunter was primarily a limited cop -- s/he could make a choice each night either to go to a room and observe anything that happened there (which in this game would mean that s/he could see kills) or, s/he could choose, once, to follow a player and kill him. This was the only role in the game with an option other than choosing a room. This kill would take place outside the "rooms", in what would be the interstitial spaces on the Clue Board.

The rooms would be eliminated one by one, so that while in the beginning of the game, it would be possible for a great deal of spread and fewer interactions, with each day the chances of interactions at night would increase. This would keep the game from going on indefinitely.

This way of resolving actions makes the game somewhat more random, but also shifts the focus of skills needed more to a social engineering skillset. EmpTyger did a fantastic job of working a good scum strategy here, leading a discussion on room choice and orchestrating the townies' night moves. Well done, there.

Will answer any questions, and will also post summary of moves later. For now, have to run.

[Masterchief]

Alright Town! w00t!

[bigAl]

Also, since it’s moot now, and I’m egotistically curious: would you mind letting me know how on earth you decided to vote me over Flay?

Well it wasn't easy. You did do a very good job of convincing me though. I think I was only about 60% sure it was you. Mostly a large collection of small things that added up to my decision.
Off the top of my head:

1. The fact that Flay came out with his ability so early (D1).
   
2. kops' last in-game post ("thanks, flay"). Especially with his bah post (which gave away more info than is proper, IMHO), which said that he was "obviously not expecting that."
   
3. The fact that you had claimed elvis was scummy, when she turned out town.
   
4. I was sceptical of Flay's abilities for most of the middle of the game (in fact, I considered that this might be all vanilla vs. scum until the doc died), but later on I realised that all the changes to his claimed role could possibly be true for of various reasons.
   
5. Flay's explanation for last night's kill was, overall, more believeable. (And the fact that it was not in a room like the other kills.)
   
6. I was somewhat doubtful about a vig role. It seemed that it might be close to unbalancing the game, seeing as you
   had
   to chose a room every night, might accidentally end up killing a lot of townies by accident.

Thanks for the game, Orbiting, it was a really fun setup!

[kops]

damn you're right... I didn't even think about not expecting it because I hadn't even thought about emp claiming vig since I knew it wasn't true... oh well, I suppose that's definately something to remember for next time

[Mr. Flay]

Holy crap, we survived! That was an intense game....I was sure on about 9237 occasions that I was going to get lynched/nightkilled, and somehow I never did. I played so poorly at first...

I actually kept expecting EMpTyger to use kops' D4 closing speech against me; another way it could have been interpreted that I didn't mention for OBVIOUS reasons was "Thanks Flay for being such a competent and helpful scum partner!" I'm not sure how I could have responded to that WIFOM logic.

The game was a lot of fun to be in/observe the special details of; it'll help with some future ideas Orb and I are planning for games now that she's got one under her belt.

It was actually really hard to figure out how to use my role, because even if I ever did discover that someone was scum, to use my nightkill meant giving up my observational ability that night, which could have really bit me in the ass if someone had caught on to that at the wrong moment.

For a long time I couldn't figure out how 3 scum in 10 players would be balanced... now I see some of why. So did scum miss their kill N1, or did Bamboo do something?

[MeMe]

Scum simply submitted room destinations -- which we did N1. There was no miss on our part. Until night choices are revealed, there's no way to know why none of the three of us (all in different rooms) were unsuccessful in killing

any

one.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks for the game, Orbiting. I'm sorry I wasn't able to play it out! And EmpTyger: thanks

so much

for taking over for me and playing the heck out of the role. Took away all of the guilt of leaving to know that the role was being played better than I would've done.

[bigAl]

I actually kept expecting EMpTyger to use kops' D4 closing speech against me; another way it could have been interpreted that I didn't mention for OBVIOUS reasons was "Thanks Flay for being such a competent and helpful scum partner!" I'm not sure how I could have responded to that WIFOM logic.

I had thought of that too...but decided not to mention it to see if EmpTyger would bring it up...

[Orbiting]

I will post up a complete list of moves probably this evening when I have time to write it all out -- for now, let me just say that the first night, scum didn't have a kill because they were not in the room with any townies.

That's why there were three scum in a ten-man game, too. The probability was that for at least one night, they would not choose a room where they could make a kill. They didn't have any more information at the beginning than the town did with regard to the mechanics. They did, of course, know who their scum-buddies were, but that was about it.

I probably could have axed kops' posts in question -- I thought they could both be interpreted in several different ways, though, so they stayed. In addition, I don't think I saw the last one until after everyone else did, anyway, so the damage there was done.

Question to those in the game: Would you play a setup like this again?

[Masterchief]

I'm still pretty mad that you guys lynched me without trying to let me offer an explanation.

[kops]

Flay's fault... I was just doin my job

[Mr. Flay]

*grin* True enough, that was one in a line of mistakes I made (many of which centered around trusting EmpTyger). I had an inkling about MeMe being "off" in the early game but lost track of it later until my final rereads, when I realized EmpTyger and MeMe were the same character.

Orb: I'm glad you didn't delete/edit kops' posts. It's his responsibility to keep unwanted information out of them, not yours as mod to clean up after your players, IMO. Edits would have just given an unfair advantage/confusion to anyone who saw them before the edit.

[EmpTyger]

bigAl:

I actually kept expecting EMpTyger to use kops' D4 closing speech against me; another way it could have been interpreted that I didn't mention for OBVIOUS reasons was "Thanks Flay for being such a competent and helpful scum partner!" I'm not sure how I could have responded to that WIFOM logic.

I had thought of that too...but decided not to mention it to see if EmpTyger would bring it up...

1 step ahead of you. I figured that if you didn’t realize that interpretation on your own, my bringing it up wouldn’t have helped; and if you weren’t able to deduce it. And conversely, if I did bring it up, it would seem like I was trying to distort incriminating words. Flay seemed rattled by his “lots of ghosts” comment, so I didn’t feel I needed to add anything. From [585] I knew you were examining it closely yourself; I figured the best thing I could do was let you draw your own conclusions from it. It’s not like there wasn’t more than enough evidence in Flay’s own words that I could find to use against him.


Flay:
The silly thing is that most one of my accusations *were* genuine. In fact, when I first replaced in and was reading through the game, I hadn’t yet learned who my partners were, but I genuinely guessed you were one. I really wanted to counterclaim cop on arrival, but was dissuaded. (And in fairness, I wasn’t sure I could explain well enough why MeMe wouldn’t have counterclaimed earlier.) Maybe in hindsight…?

I figured there was no chance of you buying my role- in fact, I was slightly worried that your cop ability was purevig, and I had just managed to guess your full role! But there seemed no way I’d be able to persuade you that bigAl was suspicious without persuading bigAl that you were suspicious, so I decided to just go fully with that. Maybe if I claim vanilla instead of vig, and but then kops is definitely lynched D4, and you get confirmed, and I still have to avoid either of your abilities while getting another 2 kills somehow. Seemed ridiculous not to just try for the single mislynch.

And you thought it was hard to use your role…


Tamuz:
Caught that the Conservatory wasn’t an available room just after dawn hit, and prayed in vain that you’d figure it out in time. When you didn’t, I figured you were going down anyhow, and could take the credibility boost to help the endgame and guarantee Bamboo’s death. [Incidentally, town: this was definitely not planned beforehand.]

This is still wonderful, btw: “I still think BJ is scummy because, of course he acts scummy, but he is acting scummy in a scummier way than he usually acts scummy.”


kops:
[579] was careless, to be certain, but at that point the damage was probably already done. Orbiting was correct not to delete it, though, because then it looks more incriminating. And I mean, I myself did start nighttalking with you at that point myself, since I myself thought the game over at that point. At that point, though, you probably should not have referenced it in your bah post. But I do not think it had any real effect on the game, so don’t worry.


Masterchief:
I feel like I owe you an apology. You had no business being in this game, and I genuinely feel bad that you had to replace, get caught up, and then get summarily lynched. I was planning on voting elvis, and could have acted quicker, especially after the mod announced the replacement warning and notice, but I’d had an unexpectedly busy week, wanted to be extracautious because this was a delicate situation, and I’d been lulled by the game’s slow pace into thinking replacement wouldn’t happen for awhile. You did nothing wrong; you just replaced into a most unfortunate position left by elvis. I replaced in myself, so I sincerely do hate to do that to a replacement on arrival, but in that game position, I didn’t think I had the option of indulging suboptimal play out of metagame sensibilities. I started an ethics thread in the MD forum about this.


MeMe:
Not that I feel you’d hold us responsible, but sorry anyway. We didn’t play this as well as we could, in that we made a few obvious slips {Tamuz’s implosive roomclaim, kops’s overexcitedly thinking it endgame}. Yet I’m really not sure what we could have done differently to get a different outcome.


[Mod comments to be added later; want to check something first]

[Mr. Flay]

My favorite quote of the game:

Assuming that there are two scum left, they must be one of (EmpTyger or Elvis) and one of (Mr. Flay and kops). Does that clear me, or have I not thought this out?

It was so brilliantly elegant I kept thinking "that can't be right...maybe bigAl IS the other scum...no, wait..." Total logic masquerading as WIFOM.

[EmpTyger]

Mod:
I hate to be a sore loser, but I really feel that, given the setup, the mafia had no way of winning. Unlike the town, the mafia had no control over whether they could win or not. And forget about being fair- that’s not fun. I do grant bigAl great credit for making an incredibly excellent decision, and Flay, for enabling that decision to be made by playing his role well in the end. But this was a town’s game, designed to be played by the town, and I feel I wasted a lot of time trying to win it when that wasn’t possible. So please accept in advance my apology for the harshness of my criticism; keep in mind it is significantly toned down from what I originally was going to write.

1) The mafia had no control over the nightkill. Let me repeat that. We had no control over whether there would be a nightkill! The *one* power that sets the mafia apart was taken from us! Moreover, we had no control over whether there *wouldn’t* be a nightkill. We had no control over who would be killed. We had no control over who would do the killing. If anything happened advantageously, it would be because (a) we got lucky, or (b) we exposed ourselves with disprovable claims to the town. I firmly believe that we were more likely to win if we were told we were protown masons, or and probably more as likely to win if we had been given a protown role PM and not been told that we were mafia! In that case, we wouldn’t be tricked into making suboptimal play choices!

2) Scarlet got a targeted kill. Forget the other abilities; why was the town better at nightkilling than the mafia? Why was the already overpowered Scarlet modconfirmable? And the town is told that there is no SK- because had I quoted the mafia role PM to bigAl, I almost wonder whether he would have disbelieved Flay, because what he was claiming was just plain ridiculous! But there’s nothing we can do about it. First because there’s no way for us to even guess his absurd power until he’s modconfirmed. Second, even if we knew the danger and tried to get rid of Scarlet, if the mafia tries to make the proper plays, they get burned by the setup. There’s no way to convince a decent town to lynch an uncounterclaimed cop- especially if he comes forward D1, before we even knew how our nightkill mechanic would “work”! So we have to counterclaim, and if the town plays it standardly, they’ll leave both alive. In which case, the vigkill allows Flay to confirm himself and kill the counterclaimer. The mafia are tricked into making suboptimal plays because of the limited information they are given.

3) The mafia was placed in an impossible position. There were 2 ways to nightkill: get lucky or arrange the room assignments. The only way to arrange room assignments was to claim a powerrole. There was a role that could confirm powerroles and confirm itself. And circularly, we couldn’t realistically kill this role without arranging roomchoices! And mafia do not know any of this until it is far too late. Had I known, I would have counterclaimed cop first thing…

…and it would *still* would not have worked! Because
4) We cannot counterclaim! If we counterclaim Scarlet, or any part of Scarlet’s multiple powers, the cop can vigkill the counterclaimer! Moreover, any role that looks plausible from our point of view, Scarlet should be able to recognize as false as soon as we are forced to give details from her role. And once Scarlet realizes it’s false, he has the vigkill. (Counterclaiming Peacock doesn’t work either, if the town plays it well, because putting both claimed doctors and the cop together exposes the lie and confirms Scarlet.)

5) If we manage to pull into a dominant position- we have no way of guessing Flay’s ability! There’s no reason for him to claim it ever, until he uses it; he’s got a cop claim that’s uncounterclaimable. So the mafia doesn’t win at a tie, a fact that we weren’t told until we asked specifically about it N4. If the mafia plays for what would traditionally be a win, by executing a speedlynch in lynch-or-lose, the town can recover splendidly with the targeted vigkill + majority lynches of the exposed townspeople. And once again, the mafia has no way of knowing that what should be an optimal strategy would fail.

6) Independent of the mechanic, the setup was barely balanced. The one advantage mafia seemingly had was the third member; in a 10 person game, 3 mafia seems generous. However, it started in Day, so mathematically, that’s equivalent to having a vanilla protown nightkilled during N0, making it effectively an 11 person starting at night. And since 12 person games with 8:3:1 town:mafia:SK setups are common, there’s essentially no advantage: the missing SK helps the town at least as much as it helps the mafia. The town had only 2 powerroles, but one of them was worth at least 2 traditional powerroles (cop + oneshotvig). And the mafia didn’t get any power. So while this might have been balanced for a basic game, it was by no means close to even when mafia-weakening mechanic is factored in.

7) The only way we can kill is by either (a) getting mislynches, for which townspeople have to play more suspiciously than the mafia, (b) getting nightkills, discussed in (3). The mafia were given such limited information that from their point of view, when it looked like (a) was optimal, (b) actually was, and vice versa. So not only are mafia placed in a position where they must commit to one of 2 diametrically opposed plans- but the more they learn about the setup, the more they are led to choose suboptimally! And *that’s* what’s awful about this game. The better the mafia tries to play, the worse it is for them.

So while the town could play naturally, the mafia were at extreme disadvantages. We we forced to choose rooms and plans at random, having no control over how they played out. We were severely handicapped regarding basic mafia strategies such as nightkilling and claiming, and our “advantage” in information we had was in that we knew how ignorant we were. Despite this, we got amazingly lucky, in that the town played amazingly badly except for the final night and day. But it didn’t matter. I’m staring at the setup trying to find a course of action even in hindsight which would have reasonably allowed a win, and I don’t see anything we could have done that would have changed the outcome.

[MeMe]

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