I love the Conspiracy games–although they are more complicated than some (with wolves, vampires, Cabal, Witches, etc. all at once).
I can’t give you any insights on this game, because I bogged down several pages ago and haven’t yet gotten reinspired to read any more.
I would note that in general, there are two types of games. Open and Closed. Open means that the person running the game declares the rules and roles upfront. Closed means that you know very little upfront. The players work together to guess how many scum are hiding and whether there are third-party roles, and whatnot. There are also games which are very color-heavy and games which are not.
If you have specific questions please ask them, someone will try to answer them. I read a lot of the games for awhile (never actually played any) and then I got something resembling a life (or at least a job) and have been busy doing other things more recently.
But sometimes, players aren’t pushing specific agendas so much as they are being themselves, and sometimes a player’s usual self is annoying to others (or annoying to read).
I don’t like the current wagon for OAOW. It came together too quickly and there are too few people opposed to it, on top of that the reasoning behind it is weak, but no one is pointing that out or defending him. It doesn’t feel right to me at all.
Hey, Naf. Thought it was hilarious that they killed you in the Giraffe Game, too.
If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it you could stay unspoiled for a while. I’ve always found your reasoning quite enlightening and would appreciate getting it without having to worry whether you were Town or Scum.
Sure. I was planning to stay unspoiled for a bit anyway because it’s more fun to play along at home that way. It seems like this is shaping up to be a really fun game, I am genuinely bummed that I got killed so early.
Sadly, I don’t know that I have any specific questions, and I’m not about to wade through the first 13 or so pages of that again - I got way too distracted by the pages of arguments that had nothing to do with the game. Now that people are starting to get killed off (sorry **peeker **and NAF!), it’s making a bit more sense - people are starting to question motivations and are seeming to do a better job of getting things figured out. Maybe it’ll get clearer as it goes along.
Is there a tendency for one side to win over the other in closed games? That is, when the game is closed, do the scum usually win? It seems like they’ve got a huge advantage.
Ah, I get it. That’s a normal reaction to a Day 1 in a closed game. They take some getting used to since everyone is more or less just sussing out everyone else. It will get a lot clearer as things go forward
I don’t know the exact stats, but I am fairly sure that it’s about even for balanced games. Scum have some advantages in closed games, but in a lot of other ways it’s a lot harder to be scum in a closed game than in an open one. The basic state of play for town doesn’t change much in a closed vs. open game setup. They start the game not really knowing much and having to figure it out as the game goes on. For scum though, the open vs closed setup changes a lot of things. In an open game scum know everything at the game start, in a closed game they only know the other scum. This makes it a bit easier for them to hide, but it also opens a lot of doors for them to accidentally connect themselves to their fellow scum, and it prevents them from leveraging information in any sort of realistic way against the town. On the whole I think the benefits and the hindrances change net a neutral change to the way scum play.
I don’t know what happened over Night, but the wind seems to have totally left this game’s sails. For a game that was so hopping on Day 1, Day 2 has nothing going on.
It seems to me this is typical Day 2 stuff. You’ve got two dead Townies, 13 pages of posts and not much more information than you had to start the game.
Yeah, I’m sure it will pick up again. And besides about 3/4 of day one was nothing but people arguing with peeker and/or Meeko. No more than noise.
OAOW is pinging me so hard as scummy that I have a hard time seeing anything wrong with his bandwagon – it may well just be instinct winning out over logic for some people.
Or I could be wrong. Nice to watch a game from the outside unspoiled sometimes where you don’t have to worry about waffling getting you lynched.
Does this seem scummy to anyone else? Repeating someone else’s case, and asking other people for their own? Making a point, but being able not to make a vote if no one else agrees?
Yeah, that’s why I stalled on page 8 and haven’t restarted. Well, it’s not the whole picture, but it’s part of it. I recently read Conspiracy 3, which is why I eventually figured out it was the one Cookies was talking about, but there are vast quantities of Day 1 in that game I didn’t bother to read. In fact, from reading the rest, I have reason to believe that buried somewhere in that mass of words is a true scum slip which caused scum to be lynched on Day One, but I just can’t work up any enthusiasm for ferreting it out.
As the number of players gets fewer, and as you know more about their roles (or their claimed roles) it often does get clearer, but sometimes only to a point. It’s perfectly possible to see what I remember happening during my best Scum Win (only scum win) in a Live game in college. There were three of us left, me, Joe and Maya. I claimed Joe was Mafia immediately and firmly. Joe claimed I was Mafia. The stinking zombies who would not shut up mostly stuck to arguing that “one” of us was not acting in character and didn’t specify which one it was, and poor Maya got stuck guessing which person she hardly knew was acting out of Character. She guessed wrong. I won.
I agree with NAF that open vs. close is pretty much a wash.
However, I don’t think the odds are even as to town vs. scum in a perfectly balanced game. I think town always has the advantage in a perfectly balanced game. And there’s no good way to fix that without making the game grossly unbalanced in favor of scum (or have some whacky 3rd party roles that change-up the dynamic a bit, without being too swingy, but good luck with that).
Even though scum have the information, town has the numbers, and should they play well, they can usually get the information they need to win. However, town playing sub-optimally tends to be more devestating to their side than scum playing sub-optimally. (Contrast to horrible play, though. Scum playing horribly will pretty much lose any game, even if town is doing badly, as long as town controls the lynch.)
Town also has a disadvantage that if it falls too far behind early in the game, it’s harder for them to catch up. Particularly in all-power games. Even if they play well. (See Super Smash Brothers 1 on Idle’s board for an example of a game where scum controlled the lynch even though town only mislynched twice.)
But Town playing (practically) perfectly usually results in a scum loss. See Arkham/Batman on Idle’s board. A grossly unbalanced against town game where out of 24 people only 11 were full town, 1 was town who could become a recruited serial killer (and almost triggered that mechanic except his action was blocked the night it would have happened), 1 was town/3rd party win-stealer mix, 5 were win-stealer 3rd parties (including 2 serial killers, one day killer, and one night killer, both of whom needed to be dead for town to win), and 6 were scum. It was an all power game as well. Town barely won that, but did so because we pretty much played perfectly (and we had a bit of luck on our side as well).
But I think the overall advantage to Town in a well-played game by both sides is no more than 2:1. And as frequently see, town doesn’t always play well. So in practice, the win-loss record for town vs. scum around here is pretty even.