In one of my conditional PM’s to MentalGuy (when I didn’t know if I would lose power) I said to reject a team if any two of {sinjin, Clairobscur, Stanislaus, Mahaloth} were on the team. All three spies were on that list, so I’m glad to see that my spy-sniffing skills are still intact. What’s hard is convincing the rest of the Resistance without coming off a spy yourself.
Thanks to everyone who played, and MentalGuy for running the game!
Some thoughts on how the game panned out from my perspective:
I’d never played this game until it came to the Dope, either online or in real life. I hope to persuade my family to play over Christmas, but I’ve not played live yet. Both times I’ve played here I’ve been a Spy. As discussed above with respect to lying online, it does seem that the game is weighted to Spies. Despite this various Resistance players (TexCat and Terminus in particular) came very close to IDing all of us nevertheless, which made for a fun and interesting game, so kudos. As a corollary, everything I’m about to say is tempered with the knowledge that I had perfect information throughout the game and thus things that seemed obvious to me were necessarily obscured to Resistance.
The Resistance came close to hitting on a winning strategy out of the gate: after Terminus and Bricker came through mission one, the suggested team of Terminus, Bricker and TexCat would have cantered through missions two and three, and won a swift victory. Consequently I stuck my neck out massively by proposing that Bricker adopt a different approach and use his leadership to try and put two spies on a team. I think I argued that there were good odds that this would happen. Imagine my shock when you proposed a two-Spy team! However, I felt I couldn’t really object to this, having suggested it, so very much hoisted by my own petard (which I assume was a deliberate ploy?)
Having got through that, we were in better shape as not only had we got a score on the board, but we’d kiboshed the Terminus, Bricker, TexCat ploy, which was fatal to us.
On the final mission, we were of course in the fortunate position of having clairobscur propose the team. I have to say, at this point clairobscur had been on two missions that had failed - even if in fact he hadn’t been the active Spy in both of them, it seemed to me to be good grounds to heavily suspect him. I thought Terminus’ analysis to show that there were two spies between the four of us was a threat, but I think clairobscur had done a good enough job of throwing doubt on him that he wasn’t convincing.
It did at the time of the vote - but once the mission had failed, it seemed to me (with my perfect knowledge) that we stuck out a lot to anyone going back over the votes.
I think the biggest obstacle to Resistance victory is the short length of the game. With so few wins needed, the Resistance barely has time to collect information before the Spies are within sight of victory. If the victory condition had been 5 successful missions then after the last mission Resistance would have known that:
There were two Spies between me, clairobscur, TexCat and Mahaloth.
I had been on two failed missions.
clairobscur had been on three failed missions.
The noose would definitely be tightening at that point. (Or, we would have been more circumspect and perhaps given up on failing that mission, thus evening the score). TexCat might have got swept up in suspicion as well, having also been on two failed missions, but re-reading our collective posts might well have cleared that up.
The full game of the Resistance has a deck of plot cards. The leader hands out one of these cards to another player, which they’re free to save or use at the appropriate time. The cards to things like allow a player to look at another’s loyalty, force another player to vote a certain way, or even take the leadership for themselves. I think the cards tend to help the Resistance, though of course spies can use them to great effect.
The Resistance: Avalon variant has assigns roles to each player. The two key roles are Merlin, who is a good guy but know who the spies are, and the Assassin, who is a bad guy and can kill Merlin (or whoever they believe to be Merlin) at the end of the game. Even if the good guys (er, Knights of the Round Table) have succeeded at three missions, the Assassin can still try to kill Merlin and allow the bad guys (er, Minions of Mordred) to win the game. Merlin can greatly help the good knights, but can’t be too obvious about it or he’ll get assassinated.
It was. I felt that not only was your logic sound but it would force a cautious set of spies to let the mission succeed and an intemperate group to expose to fail votes.
The veiled signal in your post slipped completely past me. Really well-phrased.
Again, this is an advantage of text - I rewrote that post half-a-dozen times before I found something I was happy with. Nor can I imagine saying something similar in a live game - the general strategy discussion which bracketed it seems more natural for text than in speech, if that makes sense.
Agreed. It’s the kind of thing that would be very difficult to do in live play.
Fucking terrorists. That’ll teach them
I was frightened by the potentially spy-free teams proposed early in the game (Terminus+Bricker+ someone, possibly Mahaloth) and the definitely spy-free team proposed by Bricker for the second mission. It seemed to me that we couldn’t win the game if the second team was safe. And three honest resistance members were very favorable to such a safe team. So, I was pretty much willing to agree to any team that included at least one spy by this point.
I figured that we could find a way to communicate about the two spy missions, anyway. Failing a reasonably clear communication, I probably would have voted to succeed, since in the worst case scenario, it would give use resistance cred, but I’m not sure.
Stanislaus’ message seemed blatantly obvious to me, especially since what he was arguing (that I could be better off not failing the mission if I was a spy) seemed otherwise a nonsentical idea. I thought people would notice. I hesitated for a long time to confirm that I understood the message, but was afraid it would be noticed too. Finally, very late, I wrote a long, wordy message that included some words about me not going to fail the mission. But I somehow misunderstood/miscalculated the time limit, and when I posted the message, Mental Guy had just posted the results of the mission some minutes ago.
After that, it was just a mater of completely ignoring the possibility that there could have been two spies in mission 2 in all my arguments. We were pretty safe after this second mission.
And similarly, the resistance would have been pretty safe if the Terminus+Bricker+Texcat team had been accepted. Which leads me to think that luck plays too great a part. IMO, objectively, there was no reason to assume that such a team would have been safe. It seemed obvious to me that a spy wouldn’t have failed this two members mission, hence that there was no reason to believe that Terminus and Bricker weren’t spies. That’s why I’m talking of luck, despite several people supporting it (Terminus, Mahaloth).
Note that I’m pretty sure that this insistence on stating that the original team should be reconducted would have led me to suspect Terminus and Mahaloth if I had been a resistance member. Accusing Terminus wasn’t purely arbitrary. I found his behaviour and statements actually suspicious.
I must admit that like others, I didn’t understand the rationale behind this message (even though it was perfectly clear when you explained it much later), and it seemed as arbitrary and suspicious to me as it did to others.
I was trying to seem a little suspicious. This is what I sent to Mentally when I voted.
[QUOTE=Stanislaus]
I’m going to vote to reject this mission, but my hope is that I’m looking dodgy enough that my slightly too forceful objections are easily dismissed.
[/QUOTE]
Obviously we wanted that team, but I didn’t want all of us voting for it. So I went slightly overboard with my rejection so that a) it wouldn’t be too persuasive and b) people who found me suspicious already would be persuaded to accept the team.
Well played by the spies. I’ve enjoyed observing.
You’d be shocked how many times something like this goes by without a blink during a live game. Live, the game moves very fast, with a round frequently taking less than 5 minutes. A very vocal table gives lots of opportunity to sneak something like this in, and experienced spies typically have radar up for messages like this from other spies while the Resistance is trying to listen to everybody. Live, if the Resistance misses the statement or doesn’t realize the meaning, they can’t go back and reparse it. PbF, it’s there for the duration.
I enjoyed watching this game.
My comment is that the Resistance was way too eager to approve teams. I thought that after the first game, people would be more inclined to reject teams just to get more data, but nope. This game had more rounds and fewer rejections. Not a single team proposed was rejected this game. Rejected teams offer information too.
When Bricker was contemplating a team of him+Terminus+someone, he should have proposed it and gotten official votes on it, rather than get talked out of it and proposing another team. The goal at that point wasn’t to ‘propose a team that would be approved’ but to propose a team that would gather information.
If Bricker’s first team was then rejected, then there might be a better record of who thinks what. Imagine Bricker proposes an all Resistance Team, Spies HAVE to reject it or they KNOW they will lose the game, but voting to reject is risky if they can’t get the Resistance to reject too to offer cover. Worst case it gets rejected 4-3 and Resistance have little to learn immediately since all 4 rejects could have been from Resistance, but if it was rejected 5-2 or 6-1 or 7-0! Then there is some indication that the team is NOT favored by spies. In the second round of this game ANY clean team wins the game for Resistance.
Of course, to see this data, Actual Resistance have to reject even good teams. And that is where I think everyone understandably has trouble. But at least there can be discussion such as “I think team X,Y, Z contained no spies because everyone voted to reject it” Or something like that.
I think the second biggest problem for online play is the reticence to reject teams or propose teams that might be rejected. Strategy-wise I think Resistance are too focused on ‘hard’ data from the outcomes of missions when they should be more concerned with ‘soft’ data from mission composition and rejection rates. Who proposed what team? Who rejected it and why?
Rejecting teams has the added burden of extending the game by at least two days. I can certainly see the allure of accepting a team to keep the game moving.
I think another difficulty of this game, as compared to Mafia, is that falsehoods tend to get ossified. It’s too easy for a player to become convinced that another particular player is a spy, and once that conviction is in place, it’s impossible to shake. In Mafia, eventually that person will die, and people will be forced to re-evaluate their assumptions, but here, you just end up with everyone constructing a house of cards that doesn’t collapse until game over.
I was convinced that Stanislaus was a spy. Terminus seemed to be convinced that Clairobscur was a spy. We were both correct. Unfortunately I was so convinced that there could only be 1 spy on mission 2 that I never was going to consider that we could both be correct.
Dang this game is hard!
Well I coasted to a win on the coat-tails of my team again. I was positive we were going to lose when I saw Terminus’ idea of him and Bricker, then add Texcat… I wrote as much to Mental Guy on the first day.
Stanislaus was the star and clairobscur was a close runner up. I was really concerned about the two spy team til Stan posted his, obvious to me with my perfect knowledge, message to clair. Clairobscur convincing texcat that she/he was not the spy was awesome.
BTW I really tried to reject the third and fourth teams because of all the suspicion that I was a spy. Time zones and general doofiness on my part prevented me from voting twice.
I think I’ll stick to mafia for the sake of all possible future team-mates.