1.)
This game was developed with a few particular concepts in mind: the Cop role, multiple alignments, getting players to think strategically to maximize the usefulness of their roles, and setting the stage for creative fake-claims.
2.)
I really think 14 players is the best number of players for this particular game. I felt that I could not squeeze this game into being a 12-player mini game; getting in four (technically five) different alignments with still only one mafia was not easy, and I felt that 12 would be much too favorable to the mafia.
If the game had been 16 players I feel that would have necessitated a fourth mafia member, which would then make the mafia too powerful and require the game being bumped up to 18 players. This seemed like overkill, so I vowed to stay at 14 players and worked from there.
3.)
I am very keen on the Cop role implemented in this game – I think it is nice twist on what is “Traditional.” Unlike a normal Cop, it will not have any useful information whatsoever even on Day Two of the game. By Day Three there is a fair chance the role may be dead, or – as was the case here – when it claims a town still will not quite know how to handle the results, even if they
believe
the claim.
The role was further diluted (and made much more fitting) due to the public knowledge that there were at least four alignments in the game, so that even if the Cop determines that two players do not share the same alignment, one of them turning up “Mafia B” would not preclude the second player from being some type of scum.
Finally, the information that being role-blocked results in a “Not the Exact Same” result was one last method to weaken the effectiveness of this role.
4.)
The Vigilante was clearly the most powerful role in the set-up. Unfortunately it almost carried the town to a win in this game all by itself, and this is one of the reasons I dislike unlimited Vigilantes in games – they can effectively be the sole role responsible for the game outcome. In the past I have limited this aspect by only allowing “1-Shot Vigs” and the like, but in this game I wanted to try to limit the effectiveness of the Vigilante in a more novel way.
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a.
The Vigilante will not investigate as “The Exact Same” to the Cop directly after the Cop investigates a townsperson, and the Vigilante knows they will not investigate as “innocent” if there is a regular Cop. This was done for the purpose of making the Vigilante look like a Serial Killer, or at least an anti-town role, while making sure the Vigilante has this in their head. To avoid being painted as a Serial Killer, a Vigilante may decide to only Vig as in certain situations.
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b.
The Vigilante could not be protected by the Doctor, because it did not share an alignment with any other players.
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c.
I tried to give the Vigilante an incentive
not
to kill by making it explicit that the Vigilante could not win if all the
actual
townspeople were alive, but this was apparently not incentive enough to get the Vigilante to not kill every night. To make it clear that this was not an ordinary “filled” town, I made sure to include in the rules that there were at least
four
different alignments in the game.
My biggest regret in this game is by far the fact that the Vigilante killed every night. I feel this unbalanced the game in favor of the town. I have already thought of other ways to try to limit Vigilante kills besides “You have X-Shots,” but I will not divulge them here as I plan to use some of them in other future games.
5.)
In almost all of my past games, rather than including a Doctor role I have instead included a Bodyguard role. To avoid having this meta applied to my games across the board, I decided to include a Doctor this game. To make the role one which requires more skill than usual to play, I added the twist that the Doctor needs to protect two people of the
same alignment
to be effective, and that combinations cannot be duplicated. This makes the Doctor less and less powerful as the game goes on, requiring more and more skill to protect effectively and forces (to a limited extent) the Doctor to
plan
protections ahead of time so as to avoid duplicating a combination.
6.)
I have always thought regular Survivor roles are much too difficult to play – in a way they are like a Serial Killer who cannot even kill the people trying to lynch them. So I decided to give the Survivor role in this game a back-up win condition: guessing who will kill them at night. This role was ultimately meant to help the mafia, as this role will want to avoid being lynched at all costs.
In this particular game, I definitely think the correct play by D3 of the game was to counter-claim the Caboose saying “I killed ShadowGirl N1” and go for the “let’s kill each other tonight” plan. [Yes, I know Caboose claimed to be 1-Shot, but… pfft!]. Essentially, even if this role were to
really
think they found a mafia member, they would arguably be better off keeping that mafiate alive and then saying that person’s group would kill them overnight.
7.)
The Gambler role has been something that I’ve been considering implementing for well over a year. Naturally it died before I could ever see how the role would influence a game. The role was generally there to aide the mafia, in that a player with such a role would likely pick out the players who were
most likely to be lynched
and then
try to lynch those players
. As there would be more “natural” resistance to lynching players who were mafia, this role should theoretically end up pushing on townspeople. Alternatively, this role had a
great
incentive to fake-claim for any number of reasons, which helps the mafia in that (a) such a claim may result in lynching a townsperson, and (b) after a townsperson is lynched after from a fake-claim claim, the Gambler role
itself
is likely to be lynched or Vigged.
8.)
To give the mafia just a bit more leverage, I included the “Pretty Much Useless” role and the “Townie Minus” role. The former was in place as a role that was likely to have difficulties in the event of a mass-claim, and the latter was included as a possible source of confusion (which is invaluable in a game with short and strict deadlines). Naturally, both of these roles would make even the most “off-the-wall” fake-claim much more believable.
