I saw no reason to take the last crummy diamond. By becoming an urchin, I would win if any thief won. If I took the last diamond, I would have to hope Sacher caught all the other theives with more diamonds than me, but not catch me.
Are we up for another round?
Optimal would have been to take the Driver and bury the Agent since then you could guarantee that the Driver was godfather aligned. But it didn’t matter.
My thinking was also that if you foolishly chose the Agent role, it wouldn’t matter to me either since I would know not to accuse you. The truth is I never knew which roles you and IRConfused took. All I knew is that you weren’t thieves which is all I needed to care about. Even if one of you was an Agent, I knew not to accuse either of you, which was enough.
Yeah, you were pretty much screwed.
If I hadn’t recovered all my diamonds with Wolverine, you would have been accused next. Maybe if you took a diamond and claimed Henchman from the get-go there might have been a chance, but I probably would have accused you have having the last diamond over Prof P for the same reason I accused Wolverine. It doesn’t make sense for Prof P to take one diamond given his order position.
I do wonder though what I would have thought if I got zero diamonds back.
Bah. I did take 5 diamonds.
I think we need to try to get more players next time.
Once I saw my box only have 5 diamonds, I knew it would be near impossible since the optimal strategy was probably reached: Godfather+driver (throws away the FBI Agent)+henchman+henchman. The first people on the list can guarantee their victory. The Godfather starts with the first person after the last member of team Godfather to find the thief. If there are any diamonds remaining, go on to the next player until all diamonds are recovered. With a small group and only 1 FBI Agent role, the optimal strategy will be chosen every time (at least on this board now that we know it).
Suggestion 1: if there is only 1 FBI Agent role, it can’t be discarded by the first player.
OR
Suggestion 2: if there are no roles, allow the player to have the option of being an urchin instead of a thief
Adopting both suggestions would be unnecessary. Suggestion 1 fixes the problem of small games and allows large games with multiple FBI Agents to remain unchanged. Suggestion 2 changes a fundamental part of the game, but might be interesting. What do other people think? I would be up for playing again, but not with the current rules for a small group.
I wonder what would happen if players couldn’t choose what to do with their box at the beginning and instead are randomly assigned a box action.
That might be impossibly hard for the GF though, but it would be more fun for everyone else, which I think is the problem we’ve been having. Too many players had nothing to do.
I realized now that taking Driver would have been the play more aligned with my strategy, but it was only after I sat down and mathed it out that I did. When picking, I wasn’t feeling like a detailed analysis.
I like both of these suggestions, and while both might be unnecessary, I don’t see a problem adopting both.
I like the first suggestion. I have played this game live and had a good time, but I was playing with players that were not as serious, especially when taking something from the box. It seemed to me even then, though, that there was pretty much an optimal strategy. I wanted to try forum play with it to see if the game had the problems I thought it had. Part of the appeal of the game is getting to choose what you are, so I don’t really like the idea of randomly choosing roles. I am not sure why the rules give the option of removing a role from the game, but I do like the idea of not being able to remove the agent if there is only one.
In regards to Suggestion 2, what if nobody took diamonds? Would that be an automatic win for the Godfather?
I will sometime run another game of this with the agent rule in place, but for now, I would like to try another light, quick game in the genre. I tried to run this back in June, but I think a lot of people that might have played were just not checking out the Thread Games forum regularly. If you would like, check out One Night Ultimate Werewolf.
I don’t follow this part - how would you know that the first person would not pick the agent role? If I had first pick, I’d be quite tempted to pick the agent role for myself, and then try to lie my way into being accused.
If the first player takes the agent role, and the second player takes the henchman (or really any other role including thief), you are hosed. The second player says “I am your loyal henchman and I passed on X Diamonds” (with X being however many diamonds were passed to him). This matches the number of Diamonds that the Don had in the box originally. Even if the second player is lying about how many diamonds he passed on, he would not have been able to guess how many were supposed to be there. The Don now knows that the first player is not a thief and should never be accused no matter what he says.
Of course if the second play takes the Driver Role, he could try to cover for the first player by waiting until the first player declares how many diamonds he passed. The driver would then try to claim the he also passed that many diamonds on. Eventually, henchman down the line would note the discrepancy and if there were no actual diamonds missing then it would be exposed and again, game over for the agent.
Thank you, I think I got it!
I forgot to ask you, mahaloth, did you intentionally dodge the game or did you forget about it? That’s pretty much how I spent Sunday, wondering if Mahaloth was a thief who didn’t want to say anything or a henchman that forgot about the game.
This has been interesting to watch. It appears that the game depends on people wanting to be Thieves, because that’s more fun. If you were playing at a party, I think that would be the case. But in this environment, people look at it more rationally, and realize that it’s too hard to win that way.
If you played a long series of games and counted up “Victory Points” (1 VP for each time you win) then you might start to see players attempting to win as Thief in order to get ahead of the pack. But that would not be enough, if there was still a guaranteed Thief-catching strategy for the Godfather to use.
Off the top of my head, here are some ideas that might encourage players to be Thieves:
- Change the win conditions so that all uncaught Thieves win together, not just the one with the most diamonds.
- Randomly, secretly, designate one player as “disloyal”. This player would be required to take diamonds if possible.
- Give Thieves the power to add a certain number of fake diamonds to the box, making it harder for the Godfather and his allies to work out the diamond arithmetic.