Mini 1820 — Lazy Summer Mafia (Game Over)

[callforjudgement]

Congratulations Maria!

Speaking as one of the setup reviewers: this was a pretty hard setup to balance. There are two main issues: a) town need a huge amount of power so that they can get all the information they'd normally get from their power roles in one night of actions, and b) scum need enough red herrings to not get caught out by setup speculation. As such, it's inevitable that scum would have some power roles that aren't particularly useful for them and serve only to help them make more realistic fakeclaims. (DGB's role in particular was intended to give scum clues as to what would be safely fakeclaimable, but she ended up dying before she could use it.) Actually, we probably mildly screwed up with Maria's role; Tracker would have been so weak for town in this setup (almost negative utility) that in retrospect it should have been read as obviously scum.

I probably should have thought more about the double Doctors during review. It was pretty much inevitable in a setup like this; Doctor's not a role that has a high chance of hitting under normal circumstances, and there's more than one player who might reasonably need protecting overnight (several players had confirmable roles that could have been claimed). As such, the duplicate Doctors weren't much of a red flag for me, although I should probably have allowed for the possibility that there'd be no setup speculation experts in the town who could figure that out.

Also, I'm surprised that the setup can be considered scumsided when two of town's strongest power roles died D1 and N1 (Killthestory had a Friendly Neighbour shot, there's no way you should be lynching that D1), and yet town ended up having three tries to find the last scum. I was very worried I'd accidentally made it too townsided while watching the game, but Maria did well to make her way through to the end.

[callforjudgement]

You can expect a large number of roles to target obvious townies. It's more likely to hit a Doctor protecting an obvious townie or a Watcher trying to figure out who's trying to kill them than it is to hit a Mafia member making the kill.

[callforjudgement]

So you don't think if a Doc claims D1/D2 the other cc and we lynch through both every time? Like what?

It's not weird to have an N1 doc and an N2 doc. So why is it weird to have two N2 docs?

Results oriented. This is an argument? From a Reviewer?

Setup expert indeed.

You can assess how well town and scum played, then try to work out how you'd expect a balanced setup to end up given that. As such, seeing how the game worked out in practice can be a guide to balance, as long as you adjust for what the factions actually did. The setup ended up rather more townsided than would be expected for town lynching scum in the first two days but losing two major power roles in the process.

[callforjudgement]

To further the point AH here was an example shown in the game with 2 of the same role but the difference here is they were neighboured up which gives you a hint. Like you can see how town can work it out. The neighbourhood is there for that very purpose right? seems obvious to me.

The rolecops didn't use it for that purpose in the actual game, though. (But yes, the neighbourhood was intentionally added as a clue that something screwy was going on; I was in that review.)