Espionage - Game 1 - Over

Completed Games Completed Onsite
#1

Players:
@northsidegal
@Key
@beeboy
@NotMafia
@StarV
@Urist
@Srceenplay
@Colin

Rules

There are 6 agents and 2 spies.
No player is initially informed of anyone’s role other than their own.

Every day (24 hours) a player may submit a message and a vote, via pm to the game host.
Messages and votes are publicly revealed simultaneously, by the game host.

Please limit an individual message to 3000 characters - this is not meant to be very constraining, 3000 is a lot of characters (that’s the length of your average single spaced page!). This is a limit meant to keep posts readable.

If a majority of the remaining players vote a player on the same day - that player is eliminated from the game and their affiliation is revealed.

Starting from the second day, spies must also each submit a contact target.
They cannot target themselves.
If a spy does not submit a contact target in time, it is automatically used on the last valid player they targeted.

To establish contact, spies have to target each other on the same day.
Any attempted targetting that does not lead to contact is publicly revealed.

Example Public Targetting Announcement

Someone tried to contact Ellibereth
Someone tried to contact chesskid

The first spy who successfully targets their partner is privately informed that they’ve successfully targeted their partner.

All agents (dead or alive) win if they eliminate either one of the spies within 13 days.

If the spies make contact OR 2 agents have been eliminated - the game enters a final Endgame phase.

If a game reaches Endgame, any eliminated agents automatically lose

In Endgame, each surviving agent has 24 hours to submit the 2 names of the players who they think the spies are. Any agent who gets both spies correct, individually wins.

  • If the spies have not made contact: Spies win, unless any agents win.

  • If the spies have made contact: Spies win, unless 50% or more of the surviving agents win. This means that it is possible for individual agents and the spies to both win.

Win condition cheat sheet:

If you are an AGENT, one of the following must occur for you to win:

  • eliminate a spy
  • survive to endgame and correctly guess the two spies

If you are a SPY, one of the following must occur for you to win:

  • both you and your partner survive 13 days with fewer than two agents eliminated
  • both you and your partner reach Endgame alive without contacting each other, and have no surviving agent guess both of your identities
  • both you and your partner reach Endgame alive by contacting each other and have fewer than 50% of surviving agents guess both of your identities
Attempted Contacts

P2:
Someone tried to contact Colin
Someone tried to contact Srceenplay

P3:
Someone tried to contact northsidegal
Someone tried to contact NotMafia

P4:
Someone tried to contact StarV
Someone tried to contact Key

#3

Roles out. Phase 1 starts.

Please submit your first post by 2019-02-23T05:00:00Z.

RESET

#4

Not all posts have been received.

Because it’s the first phase (which also functions as a confirmation) I’ll give some grace time - in the future please be on time! It’s totally okay to submit something provisional and edit it later - the final version of a post come deadline will be used.

If you know you’re going to be late in advance - let me know and we can see if we can work something out.

In the future if I don’t have a post by the deadline and I haven’t heard from you - your post will just say [DID NOT SUBMIT].

#5

hey all!

first time trying out this one post a day thing, but i’ll try to adapt quickly.

i’m certain that everyone has thoughts on the setup and what certain actions or series of events might mean for people’s alignments, but i actually think that it’s probably best to hold off on discussing it. feels like kind of a bad idea to explain to scum your expectations before they even act.

another thing – is random voting a thing in this one post a day format? seems like the kind of thing where people might accidentally get hammered (probably not on the very first day, of course, but still). regardless,
VOTE: Keychain

#6

Hey :slightly_smiling_face:

Spies don’t contact anyone first day, so we’re a bit low on info for a bit. In the meantime, I guess it’s worth mentioning these things to start off:

  • If spies contact the same person, that person is confirmed agent since spies can’t contact themselves.
  • We lose if we don’t eliminate anyone and if we mess up we just go to endgame, so we shouldn’t be too risk averse with the voting or we all suffer. At the same time, I suspect I’m going to be pretty shit at endgame so I’d much rather we eliminated a spy first.
  • I think the first post might be really interesting but despite that I bet some people are going to post like nothing because it’s the first post :frowning2: I’m particularly interested in what northsidegal has to say about strategy.

Probably not the most useful set of bullet points lol but it’s all I’ve got right now.

Also is that Colin from Liar’s Club? Hi!

#7

I spoke to Elli a decent amount about the design of this game but I am still not too sure about strategies.
If the same person gets contacted by both spies then they are conf town since spies cant contact themselves.

I kinda just want to see what other people’s strategies are and then move forward from there.

What is cool about this setup is since its new we have some content to talk about post 1. Although I am not overly helping myself am I :stuck_out_tongue:

#8

Hello everyone, I like long walks on the beach

#9

I’ll start by saying that I’m really not sure what we’re supposed to write in our day 1 posts, especially given that there isn’t an opportunity to actually start a conversation.

So, given that I guess I’ll start with some general strategy discussion to see where it leads…

My first thought about this game is that typical mafia reads won’t really be so effective because the “anybody but me” mentality benefits everyone, not just scum.

It also seems beneficial for spies to target the best players or at least the players with the most accurate reads during the voting because they cannot win if people guess them correctly, so they can’t just choose to not kill people who are right (of course, you can probably play some mind games there)… But good players tend to figure it out in the end, so we’re back to the initial liability in that setting… Whereas agents really don’t have any preference to who they should target, unless they actually have a very good idea of who the spy is.

Anyhow, I expect some weird shit to happen. I imagine things will clear up once the two spies start prodding around for each other. The only thing that we are confident on is that statistically speaking, the people who are contacted day 1 are likely to be town, or more likely to be town than spy at the very least since 1 spy is removed from the bank of possibilities on each check.

Though, it almost seems like a better option for the spies to not make contact unless they’ve done so randomly, so that’s also something to consider if it comes up.

Another element to this game is that it might be easier for agents if we just don’t kill each other until we’ve figured out who has the better reads, then we can eliminate at a later time either the spies or agents with weaker reads. One thing is clear though, when we do get to the endgame, agents have to split the vote 50/50 between the two most likely spy combinations… This can be tricky with spies being in the discussion, but we just need to put the more reliable reads voting for the most likely situation.

I hope I am not ruining the game for anyone with my attempts to break it… Hopefully we can still be friends, I am an agent… And I’m going to cast my vote today for @beeboy day 1 because I don’t like honey, it’s sticky and if it comes in a glass jar, makes an incomprehensible mess when it hits the floor. I also don’t like bees… So there!

P.S. I wouldn’t trust anything Urist says, if you town read him day 1, lynch… If you scum read him, then keep him.

VOTE: beeboy

#10

Espion is by far the best Pokemon in the entire Pokemon universe. If you disagree, you’re WRONG, and here’s why. Buckle up kiddos cuz I’m about to edify the fuck outta your puny brains.
First of all, Espion is a PSYCHIC type. This means that it’s strong against the manliest of all types, FIGHTING. This is a huge advantage!!! Also, psychic is strong against itself. So even if your enemy tries to use the best type against you, it doesn’t matter cuz yea. ALSO psychic moves inflict confusion, which is bar nun the stronkest affect in the game. You might be thinking “wHaT iF tHeY uSe DaRk TyPe?” Well then they’re a pussy ass bitch and you’ve already won. DONE.
Second of all, Espion is a cat. Cats are probably the best animal in the Pokemon universe. In real life, cats are immune to falling damage, and the same is true of cat type Pokemon. Go ahead, I dare you to push a Espion off a cliff. DIDN’T WORK DID IT??? didn’t think so. Also, cats are good because they can poop in a litter box, this is especially important when your Pokemon are living in the Pokeball, they have a VERY limited amount of space and so it’s very important that they do not poo all over the place, it makes it realy unpleasant for the Pokemon and they can get poisoned. Oh and plus with cat types you can eat em if you get hungry. just make sure you don’t die or they’ll eat you instad.
Thiord of all, Espion s are over 80% male. if the advantages there aren’t immeditatly obvious then there is no hope for you amd you should give up your dreams to become a pokemon master… men are just generally better then women, even in Pokemon. here is a stat comparison: a male espion gets a bonus to strength, intelligents and constitution, and a woman espion gets bonus to dexterity and charisma. as a psychic type Espion needs the int bonus, and every pokemon needs more strength and con (hp) obviouslly… gonesty i don’t know why i’m explaining this, if u really needed this explaination your a fuckin dolt haha…
forth of all, espion is a evolved eevee… think about that for a sec… eevee… EV… eevee… EV!! it’s no coincidence that they called this pokemon the same thing as the thing that gives your pokemon more things as they level up. evee has the best stat growth in the ENTIRE GAME, and if you evolve it to espion for the extra int bonus, you’re fuckin golden mate. for proof that this isn’t a coincedence i looked up the japanese name for eeve, it’s 積極的な同性愛者 which can mean happy animal friend OR it ALSO happens to be what they call the thing that gets you more things as you level up in japan!!! it’s proof qed espion is the best Pokemon and anyone who says otherwise is liekly just trying to hord all the espions to themselves.

#11

So I’m probably not going to do very well At this game. Not for sure if I can do just one singular post per game. Yolo.

Probably just going to start by voting notmafia. It feels like a safe vote and why not. They Have mafia in their name. Hopefully someone posts some game breaking strategy to win this game. Right now I dont see the point of post with out having some type of back and forth with others.
VOTE: NotMafia

Yours truely,
Srceenplay

#12

Dear Cohorts and Interlopers,

To start with, I don’t know if there’s any sort of meta around here for what to do in this game so I’ll just be off doing my own thing.

I assume that an early elimination is pretty bad for us because it’s essentially a shot in the dark so some coordination seems like a good idea. To that end, I will be voting for the same person tomorrow as I am today (assuming we don’t stumble upon an elimination today).

A nod’s as good a wink to a blind bat.

Finally, keys open locks.

love,
Agent Colin (I like that, there’s a ring to it)

VOTE: Key

#13

Phase 1 Votes:

Key (2): northsidegal, Colin
Beeboy (1): StarV
NotMafia (1): Srceenplay

Didn’t Vote (4): Key, beeboy, NotMafia, Urist

RESET

Because of the late start the official deadline for Phase 2 is 2019-02-25T05:00:00Z.
If everyone gets their post to me by 2019-02-24T05:00:00Z, I’ll start Phase 3 then (24 hours early).

After this exception, phases will be consistently 24 hours from midnight to midnight EST.

Please keep in mind how I’ll be treating late submissions from now on per my earlier post.

Some quick navigation tips and tricks:

  • You can quickly navigate to a desired phase by clicking on the “i” symbol in the header and clicking on the appropriate P# for the game. If you don’t see the most recent phases your page is probably cached - just refresh.

  • You can ISO people (filter by someone’s post) by clicking on the human symbol in the post toolbar at the bottom of every post.

  • You can bookmark a post by clicking on the bookmark symbol in the post toolbar, you can access your bookmarks by going to the same symbol at the top of your profile menu (click on avatar in upper right of the screen) or the bookmarks button on the mobile tab bar.

You can read more about this type of stuff at:
Using the Forum: General Use
Using the Forum: Mafia-specific

#14

it’s interesting to me that both beeboy and keychain had the same thought regarding two spies contacting the same person making them town.

i was just about to say that it makes them not S/S, but then i remembered that scum don’t have a PT :mulch:

anyways, i do townread beeboy for it, keychain too but a little less, if only because she’s pretty tricky as scum. @keychain, why did you want my thoughts on the strategy specifically? beeboy would be the one more likely to know more about the setup, i’d imagine. (glad to be playing a game with you, though!)

@Star
meh, i’m not so sure on the “anyone but me” thing. after all, if i understand the setup correctly, agents still have to guess the spies correctly to win.

can you explain the “statistically speaking, the people who are contacted day 1 are likely to be town”? unless you’re literally talking about the number of agents as compared to the number of spies, i’m not sure exactly what you mean.

urist i townlean.

srceenplay has kind of an awkward tone i think. not sure how much of that is because of the one post per day thing and how much of it is just normal.

VOTE: Colin

this post i find kind of hard to parse, but i’m pretty sure it’s scummy. like, you don’t seem to care at all about finding scum, but moreso coordinating to vote someone out… randomly.

you even say that an early elimination is a shot in the dark, but then try to coordinate a lynch on essentially a completely random target. why? like, what’s the point of that?

final thought: this format'll let me evaluate the reliability of the "thinking the same as me, must be town" tell

:mulch:

#15

Urist made my eyes bleed with his RAMPANT MISSPELLING of Espeon.

northsidegal kind of disappointed me with avoiding saying anything when I was hoping for some good strategy discussion and instead dropping a random vote even when she acknowledged it might be a bad idea. Is there any thought process going on there? StarV and Colin did the same thing with saying eliminating too early might be a bad idea but voting in the dark anyway, but Colin’s coordination point is good.

It would be good to get some rules clarification on endgame though since afaik I don’t think we get to discuss our guesses in endgame like StarV mentioned.

StarV is also runaway winner for most interesting first post but I don’t follow the train of thought in the section starting

You mean target like the spy’s daily target, or target as in try to eliminate? Given the way it ends I’m guessing the second, but spies trying to eliminate the players most likely to eliminate/guess them seems very obvious.

I’m going to hold off on voting until we get our first spy target announcement, so that’ll be next post. If I was voting, it would probably be northsidegal.

A character counter would be really useful here.

#16

NSG’s “couldn’t random voting be bad” and doing it anyway seems fake. It’s not that I think that the action of voting anyway being scummy or not something town would do.
It’s just the entire way the post is phrased feels very fake to me.

VOTE: NSG

Key: “Is that Colin from mini mafia”, poor Mini Mafia :frowning:
Also I am not really drawing solid conlcusions from this post. It just reads as an analyse post.

NotMafia: Dunno

Starv: Talking about optimal scum play / strategy completely neutrally is kinda odd. Unless Starv doesn’t believe “Though, it almost seems like a better option for the spies to not make contact unless they’ve done so randomly, so that’s also something to consider if it comes up.”
It feels odd to bring up as town.

Urist: “P.S. I wouldn’t trust anything Urist says, if you town read him day 1, lynch… If you scum read him, then keep him.” - Starv

Screenplay: Dunno

Colin: Might be town for only considering town strategy? Could be a deliberate choice but

#17

Contact Srceenplay

Come at me dumfuck

#18

So, I actually think that it’s very interesting how the first day went, perhaps very telling as well (I could be wrong).

I’ll start by giving out my two day 1 spy reads (which I will be voting for as well):

Key

Here are the key reasons:

Generally non-committal post, it’s not nothing @urist, @notmafia, but it also has no substance, it falls somewhere in a hopeful void in between content and non-content. Examples?

Bullet 1: Stating obvious rules as strategy

Bullet 2: Pushing the importance of lynch, but doesn’t commit on how, what, when, who… Not even a vote, just casually, we should lynch someone.

Bullet 3: A call for more information (and reminder of the first point he makes above bullet 1), but he doesn’t actually generate any information nor does he even generate a vote that we can talk about.

Beeboy

The first point here is that he brings up the strategies he discussed with someone, and then confirms that he doesn’t actually know what to do. Proceeds to state obvious rule… I’m not too fond of the downplaying of his own abilities and this is something that isn’t directly scummy, but the overall feel from the post is negative for me.

What I see:

I have information, but I don’t understand it, oh wait, here’s some obvious intel that is written in the rules and that I think is important, but I don’t really understand, so I want other people to tell me their strategies because then I might understand what I didn’t understand when speaking to Elli… I like this format because it gives us something to talk about, oh wait… I’m not going to talk about it.

The approach is very similar for both of these players, so it could be a style thing, but at the moment, I’m reading Spy. I have two other reads which I’m keeping silent for now due to the cryptic nature of the posts, I need more development in order to not sway their posting too much one way or another (by doing it this way and revealing day 3, I get at least 2 content posts out of them before reveal rather than 1).

Other noteworthy, but not incriminating:

Colin and northsidegal seem to have a similar approach to each other for round 1. They coincidentally landed on the same player, so I’m not directly talking about that, I will elaborate more another (space constraints)

Screenplay seems like a typical VT who is not super comfortable in mafia games… I don’t know his history
NotMafia and Urist are pretty much a wash, other than Urist is obviously very analytical, we should look for that going forward. Also, same approach.

I feel like I’m a bit off in left field as far as day 1 strategies go, I assume it might continue that way throughout…

Early days are usually the key to success, puns as well.

VOTE: Key

#19

wow those are some boring first posts you guys. it’s like you didn’t even attempt to entertain me.

I’m not going to bother voting this game until we’re actually ready to execute somebody. Seems dumb to vote randomly (especially if you’re like northsidegal or Colin and acknowledge the possibility of a random lynch, and then go ahead and random vote anyway). And while it’s not the end of the world to lynch an Agent early, it does help the spies quite a lot simply because it narrows down the pool of people that they have to inspect. And since the scum do not know each other, vote history does jack shit for us. There is really no point to voting until you’re actually ready to lynch someone.
We should aim to lynch the first person by day 6, or 7 at the latest. It’s not a lot of time, but our best chance of winning is to try to eliminate a spy, and seeing as I really don’t think it’ll take the scum 13 days to contact each other (unless they’re totally incompetent, in which case we should be able to lynch them anyway), we should lynch our first dude well before the 13 day deadline.
It seems difficult to coordinate a lynch in this format, but it really isn’t. Just vote your top scumread once you’re ready to lynch somebody. If nobody is voting with you, move to a different wagon that has at least 2 votes on it. We should be able to get a lynch like that within a phase or two.

ACTUAL READS AND SHIT:

  • People stating obvious facts about the setup are a bit scummy for it, as it’s a good way to look helpful or whatever on day 1. This includes Key, and I guess nobody else. Good jobs folks.
  • beeboy not having game strategies in mind despite having a hand in designing it is weird. On one hand I don’t really see why scum wouldn’t share even the most basic tactic but I also feel like I’m missing something. I’m gonna err on the side of slightly townie.
  • StarV is totally incoherent, especially when he starts rambling about fucking BEES, but that’s normal for him so whatever.

URIST’S KRYSTAL BALL:

  • Somebody is going to call northsidegal or Colin scummy for hypocrisy regarding the random votes. Their hypocrisy isn’t scummy tho and the accuser is prob a spy.
  • Somebody is going to call ME scummy for my first post, they are probably going to whine about it being a distraction or whatever. Fuck em, they’re scum.
  • Somebody is gonna call NotMafia town for looking relaxed. This will be someone who hasn’t played with NotMafia before and obviously doesn’t realize that the guy rarely puts 10 words together regardless of his alignment.
  • StarV is going to continue complaining about bees.
  • Colin is gonna get targeted by a spy for his weird codeword shit despite probably being town for it (spies don’t wanna look like they’re sending sekrit msgs).
#20

Star rambled And is probably scum.
VOTE: star

Colin is obv town
North is prob town
Beeboy miGht be town
Not mafia is, NotMafia

KEy is probably other mafia.

I should have typed this right after I read. I had more thoughts theN.

Anyway star and key should be Taken out.

#21

Dear future lovers,

First off I’m going to gun to my head call everyone an Agent or Spy.

northsidegal - Spy
Key - Agent
beeboy - Spy
NotMafia - Agent
StarV - Spy
Uruist - Agent
Screenplay - Agent
Colin - Agent

That was a fun game!

Yes Key, it is me. Colin. I will sign autographs in post game.

It didn’t occur to me we can no vote. I thought we had to, my bad.

There’s not much to go on from the first stuff. There’s a couple of things I’ve thought about that would be useful to know, but more useful to the spies so I want to say nothing about those until someone else does.

Here are some questions for you all.

northside, why did you try to contact me? I’m clearly an Agent.
Key, why does northside’s opinion about strategy matter so much to you? Is there history here or something?
beeboy, was there anything you thought about strategies that you decided not to post day one?
NotMafia, what is your favourite cheese?
StarV, could you expand upon “when we do get to the endgame, agents have to split the vote 50/50 between the two most likely spy combinations”? My interpretation of the end game is that every living Agent has a chance to solo win and there’s no group win on the table any more.
Urist, why is Pikachu better than Espion?
Screenplay, who is the person that you think is most likely an Agent from the first two phases?

Now I’m going to play another game. This one is called, “Guess the contact attempts” and I’m sure you can get how it’s played from the title.

Screenplay & StarV is my guess.

Sincerely (well I lied about two things actually),

  • Agent Colin.