2015 Open Setup Design Contest - Winners!

[Ether]

I'm not going to vote, since I haven't played mafia in years, so all of these would technically get a 0 from me. Also, the fact that I typed this post at all proves that fun is completely alien to me. Nonetheless:

Vengeball:
I'm not partial to multiball games. Any setting where the game can keep going after town has lost the majority is automatically iffy to me, and giving the town a vengekill means that this can happen as early as Day 2. This is just...so swamped with scum, which makes sense since they don't have nightkills to wear things down, but also means that there are no crosskills and you have so many many scum you need dead. The vengekill mechanic is kind of weird, since it's gone at LyLo, and as long as the town has the majority it's better just to vote so you can try to get a godfather, so I guess really it's just there for when town is the minority but the game's still on? This is one of those setups that makes me go "Huh, interesting" at a glance, and then get disillusioned as soon as I start actually thinking about it.

Shortnight:
Maybe? My gut reaction was "Ugh, the game starts with two 3-player LyLos?" but that isn't really fair, since the groups aren't segregated, so it's just a six-player game with two Day 1 lynches, and players grouped up so you can potentially clear people after a lynch. Which isn't a bad thing. It's unclear if they both get revealed at the same time or as they happen.

5P Instant LyLo:
Lovers Mafia is this game with an extra day and an extra townie. For reference, town wins in Lovers about 31% of the time, which is weird because they'd do almost twice as well if they lynched randomly. Sometimes this game makes no goddamn sense.

Forest Fire:
Maybe! It'll be kind of weirdly long for a micro, between the tree stumps and the fact that mafia won't be killing most nights. If you hate how you always die in mafia games and you have to stop talking, this is the game for you. This might be townsided, but it's hard to say, because as we've just established, towns are kind of dumb.

Double Chance of 50%:
Aesthetically I would have liked it if the two cops got positive results on each other and one member of the mafia, instead of adding the miller. But this is probably a little better for the town, even if it's less tidy. I do love setups where scum can argue their way out of guilties, and I think uninformed millers definitely have a place--maybe even a bigger one than informed ones, in open setups. But a 50% chance of a result being wrong, and in the vanilla cop's case outing a power role in the process, and each cop being completely blind to one of the scum...I don't know, this is all the town has going for it, and it seems a little weak to me. Maybe?

SemiOpen:
That 2 mafia/2 confirmed townies/3 vanilla thing just doesn't work. Scum wins 90% of the time. I invented SCIENCE! and I wish it were balanced, I really do. But it isn't, and the scientific method means that that's something we just have to accept. This one doesn't even have daymasons, which are more fun to play than masons, which are more fun to play than solo confirmed innocents. I don't get the rationale for giving two different setups when anyone who claims in either will be confirmed anyway.

Modern Trio:
Eh, seems all right. (Gaolers aren't really modern, though. They've been around for a long, long time. That doesn't make them any less classy.)

I am the Joker:
What?

Grey Flag Nightless:
I do like setups that force scum to behave differently. At nine players and only one nightkill across the game, it's a large enough game that I'd kind of expect those EVs to mean it's a bit townsided in practice. I'm probably overestimating town, though.

09:12:
I think the clock format is interesting, but the roles themselves just seem haphazardly thrown in. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to what obscure roles got added (why do you need both a follower and a rolecop?), or what got paired up with what. (Do the babysitter and the mafia roleblocker really need to be together? Can't you just let the poor thing have its vengekill?) I guess at least the strongman was sandwiched between two protective roles (what happens when a jailer and a doctor target each other? This needs to be determined beforehand), so there's that. I say all this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's fun to play.

Desperation:
I am not convinced that scum need to have a vengekill in a 2:7 game with a night phase. Yes, a tracker becomes a cop at that point, but back in my day we actually had cops, and scum did fine. The desperado role is interesting, so there's that.

Corrupt a Wish:
This one also seems like you're giving scum more nice things than they need for a fair fight. Most of their setup decisions are pretty obvious, too. The fully corrupted gaoler and rolecop are both beneficial to the scum (which scum do not need) instead of useless; they can pick whether they'd rather have their own rolecop, or a 2/7 chance of vanillifying a power role plus not having to deal with a roleblocker. That corrupted gaoler is also incredibly swingy. Then you'd want to leave the cop out, since your corruption slot is taken and you don't want a functional cop. There aren't too many combinations that'll actually be used here in practice, and none of them are much good for town.

I typed that out, and then I read the earlier pages of this thread, and BBmolla and Cheery Dog both had different takes on this. So I guess it's not obvious.

[Ether]

I did the larges too. Obviously these aren't fun votes, because that poll already finished, and also because I am no fun.

Kill All Townies:
Huh. Maybe? It's hard to think about how a game of this would actually go. But I kind of like the idea of keeping town lynches up when they're often drowned out in multiball games, and it's an interesting strategy element for scum. I'm not sold on giving the town a vig, though...and at the same time, this setup still faces the standard multiball issue that town can lose the majority entirely while the game still lurches on.

Elemental Large:
The whole schtick seems completely arbitrary. Is there any strategy to which kill to use? Then eventually you kill two doctors, and the other two become completely useless except as named townies, because even if a scumbag dies, its teammates will pick up its element anyway. The serial killer makes this swingier, but it can be outed at any point by the tracker--there isn't a ton of concern for its wellbeing, and honestly just not that much reason for it to exist. I think a large game with scum themed as elements could be interesting, but this isn't the way to do it.

Charge Me Up!
Um...this is really convoluted. I don't even know how to review this. It has a deterministic way of choosing roles, but I don't know if I'd actually class it as an open setup. It might be an interesting theme game?

Two Choose One:
Those town choices don't seem much like choices. Maybe you'd choose doctor over cop--if you can kill the roleblocker, you can do cyclic protection that way--but the vig choice is dumb and the people who take it should be judged. I don't know if I'm comfortable with the fact that it's a 3:1:12 setup packing a lot of town power, but I'm not comfortable with serial killers in general. You threw it in to make it swingier, and make it swingier it did.

Rebels and Assassin Unite In The Palace:
This is a Rebels in the Palace variant, and that's a bad start. I don't know why anyone thought it could possibly be a good idea to take 4:8 Nightless, which is already townsided, and change it so the scum can't identify each other--which would make the game really boring and random even if it weren't horribly imbalanced--and they have a single point of failure and could lose at any time.

Now you're making it bigger? Why would you do that? I get that two of the three roles added are scum, but this just isn't something you can salvage. I'm sorry.

I don't get why you would put a claimable town role into a nightless setup. The vengekill isn't even useful; the vengeful rebel isn't getting lynched. Assassins in the Palace really is a brilliant game, but like RitP before it, this game missed the point.

Double Matrix 6:
Day/Night 1: mafia lynched: 2:3:10
Day/Night 2: mafia lynched: 1:3:8
Day/Night 3: werewolf lynched: 1:2:6
Day/Night 4: werewolf lynched: 1:1:4
Day/Night 5: last mafia lynched: 0:1:3 - this is LyLo
Day/Night 6: last werewolf lynched: 0:0:3

This is a hypothetical 18-player multiball where there are no protections and no crosskills. Town has to lynch perfectly every single day to keep the majority and win--its only mistake here is not managing to eradicate one entire scumgroup early. I just...really don't like games where you need to rely on crosskills to win. This isn't a judgment on Double Matrix 6, this is a judgment on all multiballs forever. But this is what you're getting. I feel like this setup's Double Matrix 6's power role density is too low--it's okay to have 1 power role in a 9-player Matrix 6 game, but in an 18-player game with 6 scum, I'm not convinced you can throw in a cop and a gaoler and call it a day.

Cult in the Jungle Republic:
Titus asked for a review, and I already gave it. The below is a tl;dr.

Jungle Republic, with five scum in a twelve-player game, is pretty unique. Not my thing, but definitely unique. I don't feel like this setup really lives up to that brand--that's not even a measure of how good or bad it is, it's just the fact that it isn't a god-forsaken malaria-ridden swamp of scum roles from Day 1. (At least from Day 1.) It's just a large open setup with a cult in it, and a kind of weak town. (Also, it says it has 24 players, but only 19 are listed.)

I sent Titus a bunch of reasons not to trust cults, but I forgot a big one. They get bigger faster than you'd expect. With a mafia group, the town is losing one player every night. With a cult, the town is losing one player AND the cult is gaining one. So that's one more reason.

Small Street:
3/17 is really, really low--taking that 80 credit hit to recruit a fourth is pretty much mandatory, and that in turn limits them really heavily if I'm understanding the role distribution rules. And if the town also understands those rules, well, that's gonna hurt even more. Scum are just caught between a lot of awful options here. What are you expecting them to do?

[Ether]

I mean...I guess forcing the scum to self-handicap a ton is giving town something where the roles themselves are more useful as a puzzle to solve than as what they actually do? (Roles like the public vanilla and the mafia rolecop action suggest that this is not actually a Small Town setup at all, just a split role/alignment game.) I don't know, it all looks like a mess to me.

[Ether]

Enabling white flag is self-handicapping, if they choose that.
Turning lots of townies bulletproof and letting them know is self-handicapping, especially when townies chosen for their incompetence get replaced, if they choose that.
Having 3 scum in a 17-player game is self-handicapping, if they choose that.
Restricting scum to only a small selection of roles that the town can see is self-handicapping, if they choose that and can't keep town convinced that they chose a different option.

Many of the roles here are filler roles as far as the town's concerned, so maybe it'd work out in the end, but it all just fits together really awkwardly for me.

Yeah, that's just called a split role/alignment game. Small Town is a variant of that, not the other way around.

[Ether]

I don't agree with either of those statements (or think that "potentially useful" and "filler crammed in for the sake of being another nonvanilla" are mutually exclusive categories), but there you go. I don't really have anything else to say about it.