Taking notes in games

Something that has been itching at my mind for a while is how people approach taking notes. Over the years I feel the real objective is to make information accessible. I personally favor using Excel. Having multiple pages is great to organize information and its perfect for charting and moving around information with arguably an entire additional physical dimension over any notepad.

This is probably the most effective thing I have figured out so far

In that much space I am able to track what each players view of every other player is (although I usually add in post numbers of the voiced read in the colored cells.) At the bottom I track claims and I black out votes that resulted in a ‘kill vote’ so at a glance I can run through some rough wagonomics. The visual format also allows me to see patterns that would otherwise be more difficult to recognize such as groups of people pushing the same player or individuals who have voiced odd reads (like all town or just not taken a stance on enough people.) Having this also allows me to quickly catch when someone has an inconsistent viewpoint (when I update the chart and its going from strong town to strong scum or some such) which is a pretty reliable scum tell in my experience. As scum I use this to track town bias and recognize who is a viable miss’vote kill’ (and very specifically who I can try to focus a town member on to divert their attention) which I personally believe is one of the most important things a scum team should do.

All that said- I am curious to get feedback on what anyone thinks I could do better or what their approach is in their note taking. I feel like its something that nobody talks about yet has a very substantial impact on how individuals play.

F Sharp