Open 848: Chromavalon: A Bouquet of Colors [Game Over]

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Good morning.

I don't see why that post from furtive is suspicious.

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VOTE: Gamma

While this game isn't super active might as well spew some mechanical thoughts. I don't want this day to be dominated by mech talk by any means but there are a few things I think are worth keeping in mind.

Spoiler: Mostly math

The main thing is the prospect of claiming, and when if ever it's appropriate. This game is different from Avalon in that one of the muses claiming isn't immediate death for the town. Raw probability of scum successfully guessing all 3 muses in the event of us limming all 3 scum is respectively (note: i did a lot of probability in my head so no 100% guarantee that every number in this post is correct):

1/60, 1/12, 1/3, 1/1

if respectively 0, 1, 2, 3 of the muses have claimed including with their color, that is, with who they know to be scum. If one of the VTs who happens to be in the pool scum were given has claimed, those odds change to:

1/24, 1/6, 1/2, 1/1

if both VTs in the pool have claimed then they change to:

1/6, 1/2, 1/1, 1/1

If instead the muses claim without claiming their colors, then the probabilities become:

1/60, 1/36, 1/18, 1/6

Of course, this is assuming scum guess completely at random. I can format this all into a table or two if people want.

On the flip side, if we pretend that there are no muses, mountainous 3:8 is absolutely abysmal for town. We have

two

mislims. That's a pretty tight schedule.

The lesson here, IMO, is basically this: it's not a great harm if a small amount of claiming needs to happen at some point, for some reason. It will still be hard for scum to get their secondary win condition. But if we need multiple claims, things quickly get dicey. Muses claiming while still keeping their targets obscured makes it much harder for scum to ultimately fulfill their secondary win condition, compared to claiming with their targets (but of course, drastically reduces the utility of muses claiming).

There are a lot of possible interesting things we can do around how to play with claims in this game. I think the most natural is as follows: if a player is being eliminated, they claim. If they claim muse, they can probably claim without claiming their target, and we lim someone else assuming that there's no counterclaim. That muse could even "lead" a lim on someone who they know not to be a muse, to avoid anyone else having to claim. One useful fact is that if we require claims before elimination on day one in particular, then we are guaranteed to have all three muses alive on day two, because scum cannot NK people in the muse pool n1.

I did have a much more elaborate and impractical idea that I can share if people want me to but I think it is strictly impractical.

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tbh claims arent helpful. like if we run up scum and they claim muse, what do we do?

A muse (any muse) counterclaims. Either they can claim without their color, in which case there is very little cost, as the numbers show (scum's pre-info odds of success go from 1/60 to 1/36), or we could even specify in advance that a muse specifically with a

different

target should claim; this is potentially very powerful, because it guarantees that the muse who has the target of the scum who fakeclaimed will never have to out themself and scum will ultimately have to guess them with minimal info.

In other words: lets say player Z fakeclaims muse, and M is a muse who knows that Y is scum. M now also knows that Z is scum, because the muses are a masonry. So M can claim,

including

that Y is scum, and town now knows two scum for the cost of fully outing one muse.

On the flip side, scum probably won't have incentive to counterclaim an actual muse, though this might merit more thought.

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Muses claiming while still keeping their targets obscured makes it much harder for scum to ultimately fulfill their secondary win condition

no it doesnt

It does in comparison to them claiming with colors, so long as they're careful not to make their targets obvious.

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If scum ever knows who the muses are, do you really think an iso doesn't make their colors clear?

I do. I've played a lot of Avalon, and there are a lot of ways to play Merlin in it; you can lead, you can stay back, you can be correct from the start or intentionally say things you know are wrong at first and then transition into saying things more accurately if needed. Etc, etc.

Granted, that experience is all IRL and not on a forum where a scumteam can pore over an ISO. But that's in Avalon, where Merlin being found out is simply death. Here it isn't because there are still two other muses. And even if scum knew all 3 muses' identities, there's 6 different ways they could match colors to merlins, and there's a ton of potential false signal that could trip them up.

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The reason I say there's very little cost to a single merlin claiming without color is that from a pure numbers perspective, the odds of scum getting it correct shift from 1/60 (negligible) to 1/36 (also negligible) assuming no one else claims for the rest of the game. Even taking into account that scum have all of the information of all our ISOs at their disposal, I still see that cost as trivial for the benefit.

In other news: why the FoS on furtiveglance?

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literally if you have confidence on one muse's color, it's 50-50. Can you really not tell which one pushed which person more? like i dont see a scenario where im given a scum role pm, the names of my scum team, and the muses and i cant figure out who is who. like i dont see it.

If mafia are following this logic, then potentially all it takes for town to avoid this condition is for one muse to get lucky and have a single correct scumread other than the one they know about.

I firmly believe you're oversimplifying things and that if I were scum, I would not feel nearly this confident in piecing colors together.

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My point is that if the muses bring no benefit at all, we are absolutely fucked, because it's 3:8 mountainous. So we need to take advantage of them in *some* capacity.

Do you think this setup is just ultra scumsided, if you think that the muses on net aren't actually bringing any benefit?

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I like butterflies' 80 and agree with that post from Umlaut being pretty good. For butterflies I think that way of describing that her mind changed on Umlaut is genuine more often than not. For Umlaut I think that description of wanting to play the game that way is mildly town. I also like the way he's addressing the hydra, I think that sort of play toward an active hydra at this point in the game is somewhat on the conspicuous side for scum to be doing.

Galron's 61-62 strikes me as townish; I think that 62 is a sort of rhetorical flourish that scum would have to go out of their way to make, it's the kind of thing that indicates that someone is genuinely trying to process information and get reads.

I think furtive's reads post is pretty good. Or at least I agree with a good amount of it (and I don't mind being listed as a scumlean there). I am a little bit skeptical of feeling the need to "blow this game wide open" with a reads list on page 5, though. I guess it depends on how much they persist with that level of effort or if it falls off from there.

UNVOTE: Gamma

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I have mixed feelings on Gamma, particularly his last post, but I guess if he's town his post staying on furtive makes sense.

VOTE: ProgoWoshua

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I'm not anti-dunnWagon, but I do feel like I've misread Dunn as scum for play that is at least on face similar to his play here before.

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I don't like that Progo has done no analysis since furtiveglance pointed out that he's given almost no analysis. He's made a couple posts today but neither of them has any real substance.

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I am inclined toward Noraa town but I wouldn't rule zir being scum out of the question.

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I will say that I'm not especially a fan of furtive dropping a wall post then peaceing out. Sure, maybe they're busy IRL, but I feel like town after "blowing the game wide open" should be excited, interested in talking about their reads, convincing people, interacting, seeing people's reactions, and so on. Scum after dropping a wall post might feel like they've done their job and can coast.

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I just don't understand having this much conviction in a mafia game in general tbh >_>. Especially on page 10. Like I'm not gonna be surprised if Dunn is scum but there's also nothing about this situation that would make me surprised if Dunn and Noraa were both town.

Like Noraa I'm not gonna ask you to convince me because it doesn't sound like that kind of read but like, idk, I just don't find this convincing.

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I want to do more this game but it's really annoyingly hard to get any kind of foothold in reads I feel good about especially with progo not here.

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this is unfortunate. dunn may be town.

alas.

if dunn flips town, progo/enchant/____. Maybe galron or titus tbh. if it's just the people with the lowest post counts (not that i'm much higher but etc) lurking to try to suss out merlins and coming out of the woodwork to hammer someone at e-2 then i'd quite like if we not let them get away with that

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i guess we don't need to say too much at this point since any non-dunnstral merlins will still be alive tomorrow but like.

can we not rush tomorrow???? can we please make people who have given no content give content? Please?

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I don't think Noraa is incapable of doing this as scum but I feel quite a lot worse about the end of the wagon than the beginning of it.

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I think there's a real chance progo+enchant are scum and enchant told progo to vote in the scum topic so that enchant could quickhammer because enchant has a history of quickhammering. It's a 3:8 setup and scum can afford to do BS like that, plus half of their job is to just suss out which merlin knows which scum.

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I believed that Noraa is muse and pushes his knowledge, so i tried to pose as Muse as well by hammer.

I didn't really back off, i tried to imitate Muse who trying to hide. I acknowledge that sometimes people troll.

Also no regrets.

i am highly skeptical that this post ever gets posted by town-enchant in any universe. it'd be like if not_mafia posted to explain that he quickhammered because he thought it was +ev. like. in what universe does town-enchant genuinely think that him quickhammering, an action that he does in literally every scenario he can, will convince the scumteam that he's a merlin? And in what universe is he

that

confident that noraa is town, and a merlin, and that noraa is specifically a merlin to dunnstral? And above all, in what universe does enchant-town actually feel the need to justify a quickhammer he did beyond "there was a wagon at e-1"?

VOTE: Enchant

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they've also literally done nothing before or after the quickhammer. Like their iso has strictly less content than progo's. when enchant replaced in to diffusion of power they got like, instantly locktowned by like 4 people, their town play is not hard to spot and this is not it

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i guess my main quesiton is just implo why are you placing an e-2 vote after asking us to take things slowly the next day?

annoyance at the quickhammer in this setup mainly tbh.

unvote

I don't understand what Noraa sees as special in fire's catchup post. Their reads are, I mean, fine i guess if Enchant is scum x_x. I also don't see how Noraa is arriving at the exactly one of butterflies/fire thing. Really I have not understood anything about Noraa's thought process in this game, broadly speaking.

I do also agree w fire that galron is kinda scummy. but I also don't think fire has really done enough to dig out of the pit Progo has dug.

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it's like. extremely problematic for this town that literally >1/2 of posts in this thread come from butterflies or Noraa. This setup demands more activity. It's so scumsided without the muses doing things that we can't just let scum lurk it out, because if they do that the muses are going to need to basically out themselves to get anything done. We need to step things up collectively.

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I also would just love if Titus could explain their vote on me and/or step up on the leadership that they say they're planning to do. I know it's the first RL day of d2 but I am holding them to that.

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in general he just feels like he's letting other people do the dirty work,

this kind of reads like muse fishing, for hopefully clear reasons. "letting others do the dirty work" is a really, really bad reason to scumread someone in a setup that revolves around town (both muses and VTs) intentionally trying to obfuscate whether they're the ones who are actually doing the dirty work.

I kind of get this vibe from the umlaut read as well; it feels like this criticism could easily be of play that is intentional as town.

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I've had a very socially busy/tiring day, will do stuff tomorrow.

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I really don't see how butterflies is scum here. They're asking pointed questions, they feel like they're solving without really having an agenda.

furtive posting another reads list and then using that to direct his further posting is... eeh. I mean I criticized the first one for dropping a reads list and then leaving, and that's not what's being done here, but I just feel mediocre about a read-list-centered approach to the game. It's an easy way to present opinions changing over time without having to deal with the nuances of having them change in the moment, as they sometimes do for townies. It's kind of a rhetorical thing. I don't think it's wildly scummy but I can see him as scum. The titus + enchant -> implo + umlaut thing is also a little overwrought I think.

I'm kind of inclined to townread Titus but I can't give a great reason for it.

Still a few pages to catch up on.

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+ implosion - I don't like their general attitude towards the thread and blaming others for their mistakes. His response, accurate or not, was to out his beliefs on a Merlin.

I really have no idea what this is referring to but I don't really feel the desire to continue discussion on merlin-related anything so.

I want to hear on the logic around Umlaut-scum from whoever.

I guess I'm willing to drop fire for now. Still want to possibly revisit, idk, but I can see where townreads are coming from at this point.

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got any reads?

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I also agree that Titus post is good. I think it's pretty unlikely that we get away without an Enchant mislim in the event that he's town, given that (1) he's staunchly refusing to play the actual game and (2) a sort of critical mass of people have called him scum.

I'm open to looking at like, Galron or furtive tomorrow. But I think Enchant is the best lim today in all likelihood. I don't feel the need to rush though.

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Implo, what is your actual read on Enchant rn? Do you think they're scum and this "likely to get miselimmed anyway" argument is just the icing on the cake, or what?

Yes, I think Enchant is scum. I don't see any reason for him to play this way as town and I'm going to be rather frustrated if he is. That line of reasoning was essentially why I'm not really interested in thinking about alternatives today (at least, unless he plays the game).

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as far as i can tell you have given exactly one post where you effectively gave an opinion on another player's alignment; it was the post where you hammered dunnstral.

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i think that describes a lot of the remaining universes imo. And I guess if you're scum it's fairly likely you're heavily bussing which seems kind of pointless. I still think it's possible but eh.

I think enchant/galron/furtive is my most likely bet at this point. But if one of them is wrong Umlaut is probably next most likely.

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above being @ fireisredsir

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The reason why I think it’s furtuve/umlaut/enchant, is that furtive was both scumreading and defending Umlaut in his posts and Umlaut never talks about furtive. My scumread on Umlaut increased since he’s seems to be trying to move away from limming Enchant to now prefering Implosion after tr him and this seems to be coinciding with my push on furtive. Umlaut was pretty much gung ho on limming Enchant but now that furtive is in a much weaker position, he suddenly seems to be flipping his reads on both Implosion and Enchant but never once addresses my case on furtive. He just seems to be completely ignoring it, which is really strange.

I mean yeah this seems reasonable. I just feel like you're writing Galron off too easily. I feel like he's done some townish and some scummish things, and I just think lurking is a natural thing scum could wind up doing in this gamestate, but if he's just flaked then, well, shrug.

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I just as a rule tend not to put any stock in pre-flip associatives, period. Maybe that's unwise in a setup where 3/9 living players are scum but :shrug:.

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I mean yeah, I see the logic, I just think that kind of logic is the kind of thing where it can be easy to read into things that aren't actually there. I'm not trying to be critical, and if you die tonight I'll certainly be putting stock in what you're saying, I just don't personally look at games that way.

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yeah i'm becoming increasingly sold on fire-town.

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Spicy.

I want to contribute something but my reads haven't really changed. The one thing I have noticed is implosion giving more analysis recently - why is Galron now a scumread to you more than before? I think they just dipped from the game.

They weren't really strongly, I thought some of their later posting was mildly scummy and I figured scum were decently likely to lurk in the setup/gamestate. Mostly I just felt like they were being PoEd out too early.

furtive's blue thing is, like, in no universe a scumslip. Blue is also used for town (or it used to be) on Epicmafia, I don't think it's especially uncommon, and beyond that it's clear that furtive was talking about the case where Enchant flips town:

if Enchant happens to flip blue then it's on them for the hammer.

I.e. if they're town and they die, it's on them. This sentence doesn't make any sense if furtive is talking about Enchant flipping blue scum. Even if Enchant is blue scum I really doubt scum would even use the phrase "flipping [color of scum]" in a perspective slip.

Now. With all that said, I am actually sold on furtive scum now. It's perfectly reasonable to care about how you look in a game of mafia, but basically all of furtive's recent posts except 686 (which was a random question to Italiano) have been them playing defense - no comment on what they think about butterfly's alignment for pushing this wrong scumslip, no comment on Italiano's for following it, no comment on fireisredsir for defending them from it. That just reads like scum who is caught up defending themselves from being caught for the wrong reason, rather than town who has a genuine interest in solving the game. If I'm town and I see a wrong scumslip being used to push me, yes I'm going to defend myself but I'm also going to use it as a jumping off point to push others. furtive doesn't seem to have a vested interest in solving the game, and I think this also fits in with what I was saying earlier about their giving walls of reads and then not really doing analysis after that.

I guess lots of other people already have this conclusion already so whatever. but, etc.

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I do think Italiano's jump is... suspicious in isolation. If furtive flips town it'll be suspicious, if furtive flips scum then it'd be kind of a strange thing to do as a scumbuddy in this kind of game. I guess maybe the motivation would be as scum who hasn't figured out who their merlin is yet to try to suss them out, but it seems like a weird thing for scum to do nonetheless. And vice versa if we flip italiano before furtive.

Curious what fire thinks about that as an associative.

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I prefer both Enchant and furtive over italiano. I think italiano needs more scrutiny particularly if furtive flips town; if furtive flips scum then -shrug- but I mean, I still intend to judge him on his play. I probably prefer Enchant over furtive today in the event that Italiano winds up being scummy tomorrow (and well, I think Enchant-scum is less likely to be wrong than furtive-scum) in which case I'd consider him before furtive situationally. I'm lukewarm on Umlaut at this point. I guess if I'm right on all of butterflies/noraa/fire/Titus being town and furtive/italiano isn't SvS then umlaut would be PoE scum. I don't feel confident enough in those 4 being all town to make any wild declarations though.

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I'm not gonna say clear but it'd be evidence that he's town, yes.

in the off chance Enchant flips town, I'd rather know that now than later; if we think scum are bussing I don't see why not to help them. I likewise won't overly object if most people prefer furtive over Enchant though.

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If we lim furtive and he flips town, if muse doesh't intervene, it's borderline throwing, because otherwise i will be lemoned and that's game over.

This is extremely wrong and scummy for various reasons. Chiefly among them, the muses wouldn't each know if furtive is town or scum unless furtive is also a muse - if furtive is scum, only one of them would know furtive is scum, so no muse can unilaterally overturn a lim like that. I won't get into the other obvious ones but it's also scummy because if you're town you're basically screaming "hey mafia, i'm not a muse". Which of course, you could be a muse doing distraction play, so I won't go too deep down the rabbit hole, but I think suffice to say either a muse, or a vanilla townie pretending to be a muse, would feel the need to state a suspicion on someone in the game before page fucking twenty nine.

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z, z, z.

I do think noraa getting a chance to catch up before we lim is good.

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I haven't actually played enough with Titus to be confident in my ability to read her. If there's animus against her then I'm happy to consider her later. I think her attitudes have made sense as town but it's kind of hard to predict how scum will view the optimal way to play in this setup.

I don't really agree with butterflies that there's no reason for Enchant to flail here if Titus is scum. Flailing is something caught scum may want to do in this setup to try to suss out their merlin. Or even the other scums' merlins. It's not hard imo to come up with some possible motivations for why Enchant is behaving the way they are regardless of others' alignments right now - it's not like Enchant has been playing a normal game of mafia up until this point and then suddenly they started flailing.

I'm more or less ready to vote furtive at this point (or Enchant if people swing that way). I don't think prolonging the day is beneficial at this point; is there anything else anyone feels the need to get in?

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well, if butterflies was completely wrong on the rest of their solve, i see no reason for maf to kill them, considering they would do everything they can to push those lims through.

so, i think they were likely right on at least one of enchant and umlaut (now scorpious)

if they were right on both, then maf only really has hope of winning by finding the muses, so muses should be careful, since we likely won't need their info to win and anything to reveal would only hurt town. that's only in the case where both enchant and scorpious are maf, though, there are other possibilities

hi scorpious!

I generally agree with all this.

I'm probably going to be generally pretty busy IRL for the rest of this game (for the next month). I should definitely have time but might not be super engaged outside weekends.

That said I don't really feel like in-depth examination today will be helpful beyond what fire has said here.

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i concur but want to wait to check something today.

i am ready to vote enchant pending this being satisfied

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I for one am absolutely chomping at the bit in anticipation of Enchant's imminent wisdom.

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I'm happy to just lim Scorpious and call it a day.

I'm not interested in deep discussion right now one way or another.

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i'm going to hammer shortly if no one unvotes but i wanna like, let it simmer for a minute, just let it marinate. like, let the flavors imbue it

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some paprika, some sage. maybe some lemon juice, i think some acidity will balance out the other flavors nicely

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VOTE: Scorpious

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i'm not sure if i thought there'd been a third vote already or if i forgot that no one died tbh but at least i got post 1000.

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can someone please hammer. they're openly claiming scum here.

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wp nancy/flea. I feel like you two being kind-of-obviously-a-muse gave us a lot of room to cover ourselves.

I have lots of thoughts and I think this setup is maybe really good, actually. Who were the VTs that scum knew were VTs? I'm a bit surprised to see Dunn as a guess, I figured fireisredsir and Noraa were gonna be the ones relatively likely to be misplaced as muses.

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(and also you two solving the whole setup helps :p)

I think that playing as a muse is really interesting - my early play was like, objectively scummy, i was a little bit terrified to out anything important. I was thinking "shit i'm playing like i'm scum here". But the soft masonry is really interesting - there's a lot you can do just by listening to the other muses. And I imagine playing as a VT is interesting too because it's also kind of about figuring out when to say things and when not to.

Incredibly I was also backwards on which of the other muses corresponded to which scum (I imagined butterflies were muse to Umlaut who successfully read Enchant/furtive and then used those reads to justify why Umlaut would have to be scum).

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Some of the interesting dynamics at play fmpov were things like:

-I was pushing progo/fireisredsir early but as soon as I see neither other muse is interested, I can lay off because that basically confirms them as town
-There was a while where I was trying to essentially distance from Galron, which is effective because I know the other muses won't mistake that as me pushing my known scum
-There was a brief moment where I thought Italiano might be muse to Titus near the end (which could have made sense because he would have needed to push decently hard to realign us in that direction).

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Oh yeah the flavor was also really nice, I enjoyed it

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I'm interested in more setups with merlin mechanisms as well (i.e. where the informed minority has some ability to make a last-ditch guess and win instead of losing). Avalon's been my favorite f2f social deduction for a while but i only know of this and one obscure setup i made and ran once a while ago that have a mechanic like it. I think this setup implements it in a very interesting and unique way.

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To be fair about replacing in to an already solved game, that is kind of fundamentally the risk of replacing into this setup. Scum aren't even necessarily supposed to avoid getting caught if they think they're more likely to win by muse hunting.