[setup] The Turing Test

[implosion]

I do think the idea of immediately killing the 1v1 is interesting - it obviously removes the awkwardness of the 1v1 just constantly complaining that everything the other person says is scummy.

Giving town control over one of the pair is too strong. They'll just pick the consensus towniest person and ignore the mafia's choice of who to put against them, or vice versa, but probably the towniest person bc most players are town. Why listen to what the mafia have to say? Heck, just picking someone at random, voting them in, and then assuming they're town would give town a super high win rate on average, similar to the monty hall problem.

This version with scum picking the whole 1v1 reminds me of Partition, where scum have a really high amount of freedom to craft a specific situation that they think they'll be able to win, but where it's hard to predict how the town will take it. There's lots of different variations you could do within this that could be interesting. You could force scum to lock in what all the pairs are going to be and in what order at the end of day one. You could give town more autonomy in some less robust way than just picking one of the two players - for instance, maybe they can vote in 2-3 people and mafia have to include at least one of them, which would be much less statistically broken for town I think. You could do something like allowing scum to pick two townies and town needing to figure that out. You could make it so scum picks 3 players with 1 scum out of them, but town doesn't need as many points to win compared to scum. Etc, etc.