2 Rooms And A Boom

[Fenchurch]

The game night was a blast, but after it was over I went and actually looked at the ruleset and noticed that with the 6-12 players I had throughout the night, I shouldn't have had color reveals.

I also just realized I should have made use of coy boys with the spies.

I also didn't even know about the buried mechanic.

I've decided that, like Mafia, it's one of those games where different groups will play it very differently, and prefer different ways. And, like mafia, there are a ton of extra optional roles you can include, with independent win conditions and such, that can change the dynamic of the game a lot. I definitely prefer it with colour reveals, regardless of group size, and with the roles you mentioned - we used Spies and Coy Boys at the last UK meet, didn't try Shy Guy but in retrospect I can see why that would be a good role too, would include them next time. I did also add in the roles Dr. Boom and Tuesday Knight (insta-win if full reveals with President/Bomber).

But the main problem seems to be that it always plays out a certain way: each team will gain control of one of the rooms, and regardless of what information they have about who the other team's special players are, it comes down to a 50:50 guess in the final round about whether the other team will send their 'special' across or not. I haven't really seen or figured out any strategies that could give a team a real advantage over this.

Also, the best opening move seems to be for a 'vanilla' player to public reveal to the whole room and then ask for anyone of their colour to do private full reveals to them, thus shielding any specials from revealing to the wrong team. Which seems a bit boring, but I can't see a good reason not to.

[Fenchurch]

Actually I've just remembered one strategy that I read, which is that the Red team is aiming to secure control of a room and know that they have both the President AND the Bomber in it, then they have a guaranteed win. And I guess the same works for the Blue, since then they would then send the Bomber out in the final round.

So maybe that's the real goal, and gameplay is about trying to bring that about?

[Fenchurch]

Oh yeah, I guess that would be a pretty simple way to stop the 'gatekeeper' method. And I'm not aware of any good way in which public reveals improve the game.

That's another example that makes me think of 2 Rooms currently being a bit like early Mafia, which was in many ways different to how we play it now (e.g. no reveal on lynches, no night talk for scum, multiple day phases).