[OPEN]Neighborhood Distribution

[northsidegal]

i enjoy the idea of having to group players together and think that there's something intrinsically satisfying about that. it sort of mechanically gets at something that people already do in terms of their reads—group people together—except whereas in a normal game the only way to express that is still an elimination, here it's a mechanic. i think it sort of also builds on partition mafia in a cool way which has more town interaction than in implosion's version where it's all controlled by scum.

i wonder if there might be a problem when it comes to voting on evens, though. it may be an unlikely possibility, but consider the scenario where three neighborhoods are filled at three, and the last two neighborhoods both have two people in them. thus, there are two people remaining. how do you resolve who goes where? if both players want to go to neighborhood 4, is it just the first person to vote themselves for it? that seems unsatisfying as a resolution.

i also think that the scenarios for when mafia have infiltrated 4 or 3 neighborhoods are a little inelegant. especially the part in the 4 neighborhood scenario where town voting out the hood with 2 mafia in it results in a town loss – that seems counterintuitive and potentially unfun. also, i think that the 3 neighborhood scenario has some ambiguity or at least the mechanic could be really unfun: if mafia have infiltrated 3 hoods, they've either done it 1-1-3 or 1-2-2. if they've done it 1-1-3, then according to what you've laid out there it seems like they have to swap one of their members into another one of the infiltrated hoods so that it becomes 1-2-2. but, in that scenario, doesn't that reveal two of the three total hoods which have scum in them at all? in other words, two players would get swapped, and it would be clearly and publicly visible which two players were swapped and from which hoods – thus, town would just eliminate both of those hoods, and then only have to find the last hood with 1 scum in it. alternatively, if scum are already in the 1-2-2 scenario, can they just swap two random townies? this seems like it would be frustrating all around no matter which way it went, but probably especially if you were the scumteam in the 1-1-3 scenario.

also, stepping back from a mechanics / EV perspective and towards the perspective of actually being a player, it seems like you lose a worrying amount of agency after being placed into a neighborhood. there is the possibility that you'll have to come back and vote out the hoods, but after you've been put in a hood you lose a lot of your ability to interact with the game, which seems like it could lead to people losing motivation to actually keep up with the thread. i wonder if there might be some way to make it so that you retain something to do even when you're in the hoods – maybe the 4/3 endgame scenarios could be something decided within the rooms themselves similar to situation room? i don't know.