I think the tipping point of the game was the decision to make a certain three-player confirmed bloc rather go for an uncertain four-player confirmed bloc. If you go back and reread, you’ll see that scummy Cookies was pushy for the former. While the latter might seem less helpful, spreading the confirmations out make it harder for scum to kill without revealing more.
The Loyals also made a mistake of spacing Hal and brigging Darth instead of the reverse. It seemed like the lynching of Hal was primarily for information, which is fine by itself, but several town had expressed suspicion of Darth. It’s always better to lynch who’s the most suspicious, especially near the end game when the cost of mislynch is very high.
The fact that the town had only two mislynches from the start is a necessity of a small game. To give the town three would have meant only two scum and it would have been two easy for the town to create a large pool of confirmed. In hindsight, I probably should have made the minimum size to be 11, giving the town a half mislynch more and a better chance to win on the last Day.
I found the last option that was keeping the board closed. It shouldn’t require a membership to read now.
Also for balancing, I was assuming the Town would take the tactic of using the XO to switch in a new Doctor each Day. In the best case, scum would reach a point where they could not kill a townie without confirming another one or more. The fact that the “town”'s power roles are out in the open and basically unkillable is a huge advantage to the town. Even if the role is occupied by scum, the openness would force them to pretend to act in the town’s interest.
Another thing is that the player rank adds another complication to the scum’s Night kill choice. They have to consider the rank changes as well as player skill and confirmation status. Basically, it makes harder for them to pick an “optimal” kill.
Confirminating the move. I thought that it was crucial to have Loyal Crew in that position, and a pretty well known one at that. I was debating whether I should send myself there but I wasn’t confirmed. And then I died.
Before Darth used up the investigation, I was indifferent as to which way we did it, and went along with killing Hal rather than Darth since that seemed to be the easier one to get the rest of Town to agree to. After Darth used up the investigation, I would have preferred that it be the other way around, but it was too late to swap by then: ColdPhoenix had already issued the warrant, and so couldn’t switch it to Hal instead, and I thought it better to get both rather than just one. And I figured that Darth being in the brig was almost as good as him being dead, since I didn’t know he could be broken out.
I’m on record in the game, of course, as promoting that we spread out the Doctor investigations further. But no crying over spilt milk, I suppose.
And incidentally, not to gloat, but I’d like to point out that my vote-analysis program worked beautifully: The three Scum were all in the top four suspects, with Hal looking bad mostly just because he was playing so little. One very pro-Town aspect of these game rules is that the multiple votes get a lot of information out, very quickly.
I love the multi-vote system; I’m using it in all my future games. I think storyteller used it first. Besides making the vote analysis more interesting, it encourages players to participate more. By making votes “cheap” (since everyone can have as many as they like) it pushes player to vote more. And more votes means more discussion and even more votes. It makes for extra bookkeeping for the moderator, but it’s worth it.
Oh, and I wanted to thank you for the detail you put into your vote counts. It made it a heck of a lot easier for me than digging through my notes to see who voted for whom and when.
The flip side of the coin is that the majority requirement made it a lot harder for Town: We weren’t seeing who we could get the most votes on, but seeing if there was anyone we could get above the threshold at all. That’s probably a fair trade-off for the advantages of multi-vote, though.
I put the detail in because I track it anyway and it makes it easier for counting mistakes to be corrected. As a player I like to do voting analysis similar to what you do, so I like to encourage other as well.
The majority requirement I’m a little iffy on. In my previous game (Munchkin) I didn’t require it. That led to lazy players letting the lynch be decided by a third or fewer players. By requiring a majority, it forces players to actually commit to the lynch. I think it’s actually pro-Town (in the early game at least) because it generates a bigger voting record to work with.
In my next game, I’m changing the requirement to one-half the players (so 3 out of 6, instead of 4). Requiring an actual majority makes it tough for the town when it’s near end game. This is especially true for a mini-game which basically starts out in “mid”-game.
While my monitoring of this game fell off a bit toward the end, I did try to keep current and I enjoyed watching it spoiled. I think it’s a set-up definitely worth trying again, though I think I would set 15 players as the minimum. The position changing really added a whole new strategy element that was fun to watch everyone work with.