VOTE: Nanook
Here’s hoping that Nanook votes himself if he’s town. If we lose due to not getting a lynch it’ll be ridiculous.
Not much else to say, everything I wanted to say was said last phase and there wasn’t anything said by other people last phase that really changes anything.
Phase 1.6 Votes:
Nanook (3): fferyllt, beeboy, Urist
beeboy (1): Nanook
Didn’t Vote (1): Key
Nanook is executed.
He was the Mafia Godfather.
Key was the Mafia Goon
Town (fferyllt, beeboy, Urist) wins!
Some questions:
Is numbering phases starting from 0 or 1 more intuitive?
How did the character limit feel? I think we’ll keep counting quotes for now, both for ease of countability and because I think too many quotes ruin readability.
How much time did you spend on the game every day?
How did the day length (in terms of number of phases) feel?
How did playing feel in general? What was enjoyable? What was unenjoyable? Any other comments?
Any suggestion for a name for the game we’re making that isn’t "[MODIFYING TERMS] Mafia. Something along the lines of “Avalon” or “The Resistance” is better. This’ll also be the name of the eventual app. We’re not committing to any particular flavor yet, but one of the main game modes will very likely have selectable classes. (More on that stuff later.) A good name might even help us choose the flavor genre!
Hi, will there be a second for this? If yes, /in
Ruleset/setup for next run here (pending feedback): Discrete/Limited 7p
Changes to a bunch of things - please read!
Starting at 1 would be more intuitive, but either way works. It’s just something to get used to.
How did the character limit feel? I think we’ll keep counting quotes for now, both for ease of countability and because I think too many quotes ruin readability.
There was one phase where I had to keep rewriting/deleting to keep it under 2000. Other than that, it wasn’t an issue. This format sort of demands walls, where you need to interact with several posts in each phase. 2500-3000 characters would probably alleviate the need to really steam out every extraneous word.
How much time did you spend on the game every day?
.5 to 1.0 hours, if you don’t count mulling it over in the back of my mind constantly!
How did the day length (in terms of number of phases) feel?
It felt like we had solidified on the likely lynch at least 2 phases before the end, but I still thought I might glean something from the final 2 phases.
How did playing feel in general? What was enjoyable? What was unenjoyable? Any other comments?
It felt awkward for me. Maybe too turn-based? I really wanted to follow up and focus on a few statements, but didn’t feel like I got there. In the case of Key, who I was trying to reach out and understand, it makes sense in hindsight that that wasn’t happening.
It felt like parallel play more than direct interaction and cooperative play, which is my bread-and-butter for developing reads. Mafia is a social game, and cooperative play (recognizing that common goals and tactics suggests common alignment, and identifying players you can play cooperatively with is often the difference between winning and losing.
Any suggestion for a name for the game we’re making that isn’t "[MODIFYING TERMS] Mafia. Something along the lines of “Avalon” or “The Resistance” is better. This’ll also be the name of the eventual app. We’re not committing to any particular flavor yet, but one of the main game modes will very likely have selectable classes. (More on that stuff later.) A good name might even help us choose the flavor genre!
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I need to think on this a little bit. Are you looking for a name that captures what’s different about playing turn-based mafia, or something more general about teams/alignments/conflicts?
The Resistance is a name of another card game that I may very well bring over here at some point so I would advise against that name
Yeah, we played a game of Resistance here a few months ago. I don’t think “Resistance” was an actual suggestion.
Still kicking myself for not explicitly claiming scum in that second to last post to try and derail the lynch lol. Good work town, thanks for being my scumbuddy Nanook!
I’ll answer the questions later today. Overall I really enjoyed it, probably more than standard mafia.
I’m ok with starting with phase 0, but I think starting at 1 makes more sense.
The character limit was perfect without quoting. I agree with you about quotes, they should be avoided in mafia games when possible.
I spent 1 to 1.5h per night, except at the end. But I definitely put in maximum effort, and could have gotten away with .5 or .75.
The day felt a bit short. Phase 0 was a crapshoot, and we had to come to a conclusion by phase 5. I felt like the only really valuable phases were 1-4.
The game was fun, but I think that could be attributed to a good playerlist more than anything. If I didn’t care about the playerlist it might’ve been slightly less enjoyable than a normal game due to how disorienting it was to interact with people. I would see something in phase 1 that I wanted to respond to… and I’d respond to it. Then I had to read the phase 2 posts knowing that they didn’t read what I wrote. Then I’d write my phase 3 post with a response to something I saw in phase 2… and then finally when writing my phase 4 post I’d see a response to a comment I made about phase 1. And then there were only 3 phases left.
If I were to suggest an improvement, I’d maybe stagger the post times? For example, with 7 people playing the next game, 3 players would have their posts due at 12pm and 4 players would have theirs due at 12am. And have the groups shuffled each day phase, so you get a chance to interact more robustly with each of the other players.
As far as names go… my best suggestion is something akin to ‘Parliament’, because government is equal parts intrigue and mindbogglingly slow.
Urist and I chatted about a possible tweak that I called microturns. Every player would have the option (once or twice per game day) to post something before then next phase. This would allow someone to answer a particularly burning question, or to post something to another player (or all the players) that they’d like responses to in the next phase posts.
I’m not sure about the optimal number of microturns per player, but if we added something like that it should be an extremely limited resource that players have to think carefully about how they use.
Maybe the character count should vary based on the number of players, too. With more players to question and to respond to, 2000 characters might not go very far.
If anything I think there should less for more players and more for less players because we want to keep the reading time capped. Won’t go below 2k though.
Would it make sense for votes to be a separate thing from the discussion? I didn’t vote until the end because I was paranoid about someone getting hammered in an early phase simply because we couldn’t vote with knowledge of other’s votes. Anyway, maybe a separate topic just for votes that players can post in. I feel like vote transparency would be really important in an app version of this game format, too.
It’s a sort of paradigm thing, I guess.
There will be an app version of this game? Sounds great
I think separating quotes from character count makes sense, but I understand the impetus behind not doing that. I suspect this sort of setup might be town-sided overall, but it’s also just possible there was a really strong town in the first game.
I think the problem with the staggered deadlines + the microturns is that people’s free 30 min or so are sometimes in the same relatively short time interval everyday.
r.e. voting - I think the paranoia you’re describing is a feature not a bug, and given the no lynch rule this run it was definitely mechanically correct to vote earlier. Not sure what you’re talking about when it comes to vote transparency and why it eventually being an app is relevant - the idea is that you’re voting based on what people have said but without the idea what they’ll actualy do and the concept of submitting a vote, a post, and an action every phase is easy to put into a decent ui.
I was actually expecting scum-sided if we used established mafia setups!
We can start by trying every player having 1 tweet-length free post the entire game. Probably in a december run of the game given that’ll I’ll be gone in Nov.