HookerChemical has nominated the following team for Mission 3.1:
Johnny Bravo
Terminus Est
Stanislaus
HookerChemical
Please PM me your accept-reject votes before 5:00 pm central time on Thursday, November 20th. I will move on to the next phase anytime after 5:00 PM tomorrow (Nov. 19) if I have received all votes.
You know, it strikes me that you should just tell us whether this mission passes or fails. If there are any scum on the mission at all, then it’s game over.
Unless for some reason there are scum who vote to accept and therefore prolong the game, but I feel like that would be kind of a dick move.
Bravo we are voting whether to accept Hooker’s team. If we reject it, then storyteller gets to propose a team. But I agree once a team is accepted, it’s either game over or not.
I can accept this. I don’t know if it will work but I think it’s got as good a chance as we can give it.
I agree there’s an element of luck in this game; I think once you accept that you just have to do as best you can.
Really, this is what we’re going with? We’ve just completely given up, have we?
:smack:
Carry on then.
I have a vague evidence-free premonition that you and Hooker will be celebrating in a few hours, while the rest of us vote you co-winners of the Spy MVP award … :eek:
I will have more to say in the following post but for now I have received enough approve votes to know that this mission will be approved. With two spies on it the spies are guaranteed a win.
So, congratulations to the spy team of Storyteller, sinjin, Stanislaus, and Terminus Est.
Thank you to all who played and gave it your best effort.
I do not mean to diminish the spies victory with what I am about to say, but I made a mistake by choosing to have ten players in this game. The resistance had very little chance to win.
As I said, I had played the game in person and was wondering how it would work on a message board. I have never played with more than 7 players before, though. I also do not own the original commercial copy. When I have played it, it was using playing cards, or more recently, the Avalon variant which my son owns.
I knew the game worked well with 5 to 7 players and I had too much faith in the game designers that a different amount of players would not change things that much. After the signups, when I was doing the setup, I realized this was probably not a good assumption.
With 5 to 7 players, only 2 players are chosen for the first mission, but with 8 or more, 3 players are chosen for the first mission. This means the chance of a random team not having a spy on is the following:
5 players - 30%
6 players - 40%
7 players - 29%
8 players - 18%
9 players - 24%
10 players - 17%
As you can see, just from random picking, the resistance has a much better chance of getting a point on the first mission. But on top of that, if the spies fail the mission, then there are not as many players to hide in. This gives them much more incentive to let the first mission succeed even if they are on it. So the resistance is much more likely to have gained a point after the first mission with 5 to 7 players and even if they do not gain a point, they have a smaller pool of players with a known spy in it.
I figured I was not the first person to try this game online, I just did not know where to look. I have since found it played on boardgamegeek forums and have heard it is sometimes played on xkcd forums. Looking at the boardgamegeek forums, almost all the games are 7 player. The ones that have more players almost always have special roles or special rules.
So, I apologize to those who muddled through this game with very little chance to win.
I want to thank all those who gave it their best in the game. I also want to thank septimus especially who realized the small chance the resistance had, but still spent considerable time contemplating the game.
I realize that I may have turned some of you off to this game for good, but for those that would like to try a more balanced version, I will run a second try with a maximum of 7 players. If you are interested sign up in this thread. I will make a new thread when the game starts.
Go team!
Thanks to MentalGuy for introducing a new game to the boards. I think it’s got a lot of potential as a game.
I do think that the move from a F2F to a text only game did give the Spies an advantage, and that it was always going to be difficult for the Resistance to win.
Simul-post with MentalGuy.
The point about the odds is well taken - I think we were always confident that one of us would get on to a team so we didn’t feel under pressure particularly. I do think that the fact that it’s so much easier to dissemble over the net made things a lot easier for us.
I would definitely be interested in playing again. Fewer players would even up the odds somewhat. Another option that occurred to me would be to increase the number of missions the Spies need for victory. Even if we had been able to keep waiting for one-Spy teams, eventually it would have been possible for the Resistance to isolate us. But with only 3 missions needed for victory it was impossible to collect enough data. Had it been 6, then we would have had to work much harder to get ourselves onto teams in the face of increasing evidence that we weren’t to be trusted.
E.g. After the second mission, the Resistance knew:
At least one spy in (TexCat, Mahaloth, storyteller)
At least one spy in (Johnny, Terminus Est, septimus, Mr Shine)
If you assume that there was *only *one Spy on each mission (which I think is the most parsimonious assumption, although I obviously have the benefit of insider info) then that leaves you with:
Two spies in (sinjin, Stanislaus, HookerChemical).
With more missions to experiment with, it could have been possible for Resistance to isolate at least one of me or sinjin - or at least force us to Succeed in our mission - but by the time this data was available, it was too late as the next mission was Win or Lose.
I’d suggest it might be possible to run bigger games IF the WinCon for Spies is such that at least one Spy needs to go on two missions.
Thanks for running this, MentalGuy. At the end of the day I think I’d rather play Mafia than Resistance in the pbp format. I just can’t keep track of all the IF->THEN statements that we ended up with.
Fun, though!
Congratulations to the Spies! Well played! Kudos to Terminus Est who dared to propose a two-Spy mission.
I think it’s too easy for a default convention (e.g. whoever has the bluest shirt votes Fail) to keep Spies from Double Failing. I’d change the rules so that each Spy on a mission sends in a probability rather than a Fail/Succeed message. Each Spy on the mission would fail independently (via random.org) with the average probability of the Spies’ submissions.
High five to the spies all around!
If anyone should get a spy MVP award, it’s septimus, who greatly obfuscated the situation and succeeded in confusing everyone, resistance and spies alike. Thanks, septimus! I still don’t know WTF you were thinking when you proposed two spies in mission 1.
I’m definitely up for another go. I know that BoardGameGeek.com runs games on their Resistance forum. I’ll check to see how they’re run there.
Hard to see who’s got the bluest shirt online!
I do take the point though (an easy one would be first in alphabetical order fails, all others succeed) but a probability based approach is susceptible of a mechanical optimisation, which is no fun. I like the basic idea that spies have to co-operate blindly and I think it’s worth trying to preserve it.
I’d be interested to hear from the Unspoiled thread, and also from my fellow Spies about how they felt it went.
I think the game’s inventors were Spy MVPs, to be honest. The factors that led to our victory were:
And then…
4) Resistance latched on to a false assumption early and didn’t re-examine it
5) It was quiet - too quiet. Lack of conversation made an easy job easier.
But the first three clinched it. And the last is perfectly understandable, given the difficulty of making sense of anything.
In my opinion, I feel this is a terribly shitty statement to make.
I agree. I was only knowledgeable about the TableTop video for the game, which had 5 players. I was surprised to see that the 10 player version also only has a best of 5 setup. I really don’t think the game could possibly scale that way. You can’t have more spies than there are missions needed to fail. Heck, I would argue that you shouldn’t even have spies equal to the number of missions needed to fail.
I would classify such conventions as ‘cheating’ just as sending a PM would be considered cheating. Cheating defeats the purpose of the game which is to entertain (not win).
There was sufficient evidence to believe that spies were signaling other spies, so it was certainly plausible. If there was only one spy on the first mission, there was no scenario that gave the Resistance a path to pursue. Or choices were going down an ultimately incorrect path or stumbling in the dark.