"Hi guys! This game was super fun, and I really enjoyed getting to know some of you in an environment that wasn’t an anonymous game. I’m honestly probably the happiest I’ve ever been with a game that I’ve played.
Full disclosure, I am not known for my brevity. I’m going to try to edit this down if I have time, but this will not be short most likely. I will try to go roughly in order so you can jump around if need be.
So at the start, I knew that because of the nature of the game, if even one person was threatened by me and thought that I would be hard to beat in the end, they could dump their votes on me and take me out. Because of that, early on I was social and made the friends who I needed to ensure my own safety, but I intentionally didn’t try to pull big moves at the start. I joined up in a seven person alliance with Xof, Shadow, Meme, Aronis, Vash and Empire pretty much immediately, and my plan was to ride that alliance out while shielded by the more obvious targets like Xof and Meme. Additionally, I recognized that I needed to strike a balance between being social with some people who weren’t in our alliance (like I was, especially with D3f, Shrek before he lost all of his votes, and Flum) and making sure that the people I was working with didn’t feel that I was too connected to others causing them to get sketched out like what happened to Aronis.
During the early part of the game, I pretty much just went with whatever votes my alliance decided. Sometimes I was probably the first person to throw out a name, but most of the time I didn’t want to rock the boat at this early stage. The most interesting round from the premerge for my game was the round where I decided to go along with booting Flum, who I had a three-person side-alliance with Shadow with, because Flum was plotting on targeting “a big player” the following round and I needed the big players alive as shields for the early part of the game.
The big turning point for my game was probably around the Aronis round when I approached Empire and suggested that we go to the end together with the two of us and someone else who hadn’t made a major impact on the game (Menno, Shrek, or Mallow) because looking at my alliance at that point, I honestly believe that my game wasn’t perceived as well as most of them. Xof, fairly or unfairly, was seen as a master manipulator by people like D3f and had an expansive social game with people like Mallow that no one else in our group had, and I believe that she would have won handedly if she was here. Shadow I felt slightly better about going to the end with, but I knew that she had a slightly more expansive social game than me and she had more moves that were purely hers (for example she was responsible for flipping the vote on IPS based on information Vijarada gave her) and additionally when Xof was Immune people tried to take her out instead which to me made me think that she was viewed as the other big social threat. Aronis was either already booted or being booted when this plan was formed, but I do think he could have been a formidable threat and he talked much more to a wider array of people than I did, and additionally according to Xof he tried to get people to vote for me/Shadow/Meme during the round where he went home so I think I was justified in being a little unsure if his endgame even involved me. And Meme was the most dominant member of our alliance, had many many schemes and plots involving who to eliminate and when and I absolutely knew that if he was in the end he would deserve to beat anyone else, like he rocked this game.
So basically I went to Empire and was like, look our alliance is great and I like them, but we need to look out for ourselves and go with the people we have the best chance of beating. I played up how little I had talked to people who weren’t in our alliance because I knew that he felt like he hadn’t talked enough to enough people (although I do think I talked to more people outside our alliance than he did, particularly Mallow who I at least had a few conversations with when most people weren’t talking to him and Shrek who I was actually responsible for inviting to Discord and had a really long nice conversation with before he lost all of his votes). Right around this time, we also formed a final three with Shadow which I was honest about for like less than a day before I realized that there was no way I could take her to the end and expect to win. This did hurt because Shadow was definitely the person this game who I felt emotionally closest to and she trusted me a ton, but I knew I had to act in my own best interest and do what made sense for me and hope that Shadow would understand. So all during the Aronis round or slightly after, Empire and I agreed to go to the end with one of Mallow/Meme/Shrek without consulting any of them and got in a final three alliance with Shadow that I knew I wouldn’t be able to be loyal to.
The Xof round was a really interesting one for me because I was in an interesting spot in terms of what I knew and what other people thought I knew. Empire told me very near the beginning of the round basically as soon as it was a thing that D3f was planning on voting out Xof and was planning on leaving me out of the loop because he thought that Xof and I were tight. Then later, Meme approached me and explained the same thing, not realizing that Empire had already told me what D3f was doing. Empire and Meme both preferred that Xof not die, which is why Empire ultimately voted Menno before he left, but they had also both promised to vote Xof on the round where Menno was being voted out to D3f which had kind of put them in a corner. Meme and I ended up having a discussion after Empire had left where the decision was made on who would live and who would die between Xof and Menno. Ultimately, I decided not to tell Shadow or Xof to potentially save Xof for a couple reasons. First, I thought Menno was the ideal person to go to the end with for me, followed by Mallow, followed by Shrek. Shrek actually made a legitimately good move saving himself and blindsiding Vash and I thought he had the best case out of those three people for winning, but I knew that in status quo people wanted to vote Menno first and were leaning towards Mallow after that, so by allowing Xof to be blindsided I gave Menno Immunity the next round and forced us to go for Shrek. Second, I knew that Xof did need to die at some point and I didn’t want to have to spend the votes to save her/eliminate her in the future. I had always tried to keep D3f alive up to this point because I knew that he was gunning for people in my alliance that weren’t me, and even though he lied to me pretty much constantly and I was totally aware of it, I was also aware of the fact that he wanted to take me very far in the game and wanted to eliminate people like Shadow and Xof, so even if the timing wasn’t exactly what I had planned, I was flexible and definitely didn’t want the round to flip on to D3f. And third, I wanted to hide my relationship with Empire and Meme from everyone. I couldn’t allow Meme to realize that Empire had already told me and that we were as close as we were, so when he came to me I played dumb and pretended that I was getting the information for the first time, and I didn’t want Shadow to realize that I was double-dealing in final three alliances with both her and Meme, so I pretended to know nothing to make her feel super comfortable. If Shadow had realized that Meme and Empire were involved in a deal behind her back and tried to make a move, she almost certainly would have told me after we were both supposedly blindsided together and I would have been able to plan accordingly. So by not telling anyone other than Meme and Empire that I knew about the Xof vote, I ultimately maintained the equilibrium that I had built that was pretty favorable to me. Now admittedly I don’t think I should get credit for Xof dying because I didn’t actually cast the votes and I wouldn’t have wanted to, but I did know what was happening the entire time and I allowed it to happen and took advantage of the situation.
After Xof, things went pretty smoothly. Shrek was eliminated next as I set up by voting Menno the previous round. After that my intention was to eliminate Mallow, because Mallow and Shadow were the last two people with as many votes as Empire and I had. However the main reason that I wanted Mallow dead was because Menno had no votes and could do nothing, so when Mallow spent his votes on eliminating Menno he suddenly had almost no votes and could do nothing and so he basically was as good of an endgame person for me as Menno would have been. The following round was the last round where something could have gone wrong when we voted out Shadow, but fortunately Meme and D3f still didn’t realize how close Empire and I were and that by voting out Shadow they were voting out the last person with any hope of opposing us in terms of votes. After that Empire and I literally had over 2/3rds of the vote combined, so I just told Empire how many votes to put on Meme like we’d been planning all the way since Aronis’ elimination and it went smoothly ahead. I intentionally gave myself one more vote than Empire so that just in case Empire was considering cutting me in the F4 he wouldn’t be able to, and then I cut D3f for the reasons I explained in the post where I did it.
So basically I think I’ve been super strategic at every step of the way. I had a plan all the way from final 10 of me and Empire, in my eyes the least likely to win of our alliance, and Mallow/Menno/Shrek in the Final 3 and I did everything in my power to make that a reality. In so many conversations in this game, more than I can remember or list here, I would have to keep track of what each person thought the gameplan was and then see how I could make what they thought the gameplan was fit what I wanted to happen in order to give myself the endgame that I wanted and the best possible chance of winning.
I believe that I played the best of the final three. I was the first one who approached Empire with the plan that would ultimately be successful, and at moments where Empire seemed like he might be wavering I constantly played up how important it was to eliminate Shadow and Meme despite the fact that we formed final three alliances with both of them. I also did a lot of the logistical stuff in our alliance in terms of deciding how many votes we would be spending each round which was what allowed me to be the one making the decision at the end. I managed my votes better than anyone else which was why I was able to have control at the end. I also believe that I had a much more clear sense of the order that people needed to die in in order for us to achieve our goal than Empire. At final seven I remember that Empire asked me if we should kill Shadow at final 5 or final 4 and I explained to him that it had to be neither because of the number of votes Shadow had and the fact that if she decided to force eliminate the last of Mallow/Meme we were basically screwed over. That’s admittedly a small example, but I think many times things like that happened in this game where I had already mostly planned out the general order in which people would die, and Empire knew about the goal, but not exactly who we needed to die when in order for that to happen. I had a dream and I took the steps that I needed to take in order to actualize it. I do not believe that Mallow or Empire would be here without me, I think they needed me in this game and all of the work that I put in, and that’s why I believe I should win."