Good game all.
Thanks to Chaqa and Fluminator for a great setup, and all the effort they put in to keep this one going. Some really interesting roles and a setup that created a lot of opportunities for strategic thinking and game theory. Also, I just read the GOD QT, and I really appreciate that Flum asked people interesting questions by PM and then posted their answers in the GOD QT. It was very interesting to read.
As for the players, I felt my heart swell with confidence when I saw the scum team. Really great to be teamed up with ND, Toemato, uclabb, and Toemato. I think ND may be the mafia MVP, even though his game was short lived. His posts left no trail at all, and helped us to lynch wjessop and Maniac. I think one of the harder things to do as Mafia is to think carefully about the trail that you will leave when you flip, especially because you have no idea when that will be. ND's appearance was brief, but his influence was significant.
uclabb was a voice of wisdom in both the Mafia QT and the Town thread. I felt a surge of confidence when he entered the Mafia QT, and his experience was very valuable as we negotiated over who to kill and RB. He also came across in the thread, to me, as just about exactly the same as Town uclabb. I'm not surprised he was off the radar of most Townies. I'm glad that he's been on my team in the two games I have played with him.
Yoyo is hilarious, and has a knack for avoiding being lynched. I really don't know what it is. He's like teflon. A teflon Honey Badger. To avoid suspicion is a valuable trait as town or mafia, but it's especially key as role blocker.
And Toemato made a great debut. It was an ambitious thing to jump into this fray as the only first-time player. Toemato certainly had some growing pains (copying other people's reads was great!), but he survived a long time, and he managed to leave a trail that really helped the rest of us in the end game. I was shocked when I went back and saw that his first posts agreed with a case that someone made on me, and tried to remove suspicion from Y2K. When I was reading the thread in realtime, I was worried that Toemato was town reading Yoyo and me too much and leaving connections, but he left some real gems in there for us to use later.
As of the townies -- a few stand out in my mind right this moment:
Salladin deserves more credit for the way he played as cop. I'm not quite sure how the Day 1 lynch settled on him. I think that may have been some bad luck. But he handled it really well, crafted a really interesting reaction test with his claim to have scanned me, and gave Town one of its most crucial finds with his ND scan. Salladin almost put the town on track to win, despite having to claim a PR to save himself on Day 1.
HR is good at this game. He scares me. The mafia QT reflects this.
Captainmeme is really good too. I've seen you singlehandedly shift an entire town around to different votes at EOD like that before, and it is a crazy good trick. Of course, you can only do it if you have the power to pick a target and convince everyone to move there immediately. So, basically, only captainmeme can do it. That was really impressive.
wjessop -- I'll always be #teamwjessop. I feel like people throw out the term "buddying" too often as some kind of clue, when sometimes people are just being polite. But I buddied the Hell out of wjessop. He just really needed a friend in this game, and I was there. That said, I think you played well as town, and your effort to question and take risks is really valuable. You were at a disadvantage in this one, I think, because people are just used to you being scum, and they've only seen you as scum, so they read your posts and think: "that sounds like wjessop. wjessop is scum." You played well, and caught a tough break with the RB on you on Night 1 which created a hysteria.
Maniac -- I'm afraid of you too. You always keep the game interesting, and when my eyes are glazing over from reading yet another dull mafia post, a post from Maniac is like a shot of caffeine. You make the game more fun.
Y2K -- I feel like we had a really epic back-and-forth all game. You caught me from the beginning. And while your read wavered at times, you always returned, like a good cockerspaniel. Honestly, I think you are Town MVP in this one. Your instincts were strong all things considered, and I think you did a pretty good job making cases. You probably should have gotten more traction than you did. You also came out swinging enough to get a townread from nearly everyone in the early game, which is really quite valuable for town. You deserve far more credit than you received in the God QT (and you received a lot of credit there).
guak -- I was a little hard on you in some of my comments, because I thought that might be a bit more authentic Town Balki, and you're always so quick to spot buddying. Your lurking strategy as JOAT was smart, and you obviously paid close attention to the thread. Your uclabb read was brilliant, and your Balki read was pretty damn spot-on too. I thought you had me when you voted for me at the start of the last day. It was really a challenge to wriggle free. Great game.
TOP FIVE MOMENTS FOR ME:
(1) Reading Salladin's fake scan of me at the start of Day 2 and giggling like a school girl. Rats! That would have made this game so easy!
(2) wjessop's Balki read just before he went to the gallows: "TOWN!" That one made me feel good.
(3) Salladin's "cussmind" "ND is scum" breadcrumb. That was pretty funny.
(4) Trying like mad to decipher captainmeme's secret message to me, which he had to send with a fairly obvious screenshot, and thinking it must be so important, and finally figuring out that I was meant to just read down the first word of each line and seeing that it didn't really contain anything important at all. :-( I thought you were going to tell me a secret!
(5) Shameless scum #dreamteam gloating in the Mafia QT. We were very full of ourselves, but we were having fun.
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God Team Announcement
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