[SETUP] Mafia on a Grid

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[SETUP] Mafia on a Grid

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Thu Aug 10, 2017 1:32 pm

Post by Vi »

Hopefully I can explain this one as well as I can envision it.

3 Scum
10 Town
and one 3x3 grid

PHASE 1: GRID PLACEMENT
Pregame, one player is randomly chosen to place themselves on the 3x3 grid.
Players may talk during this phase.
Once per player, each player who is on the grid may choose one player who's not on the grid, and place them wherever they want.
In the interest of expediting the game, a player who is not on the grid may ask the moderator to randomly place them on the grid. (They can then place one other player on the grid.)

If deadline for this phase passes, everyone not assigned gets placed randomly.


PHASE 2: GRID DEMOLITION
Each player on the grid is attached to a row and a column.
These rows and columns may be "cut off". Players are removed from the game if BOTH their row AND their column are cut off.
Players vote on rows and columns to cut off. Cutoffs occur at a majority threshold. If a player votes for the row or column they are in, their vote holds double weight (the threshold does not change).

When a cell is cut off (row and column), the grid collapses back into a contiguous whole. In other words, you cannot subdivide the grid into mutually inaccessible parts.

At the start of this phase, the scumteam cuts off one row or column of their choice. There are therefore five remaining "lynch" targets.

There is one deadline for this phase, and it does not reset. If this deadline runs out, the scum win.

Each player who is removed from the game has the option of moving one living player to an adjacent cell on the grid. An eliminated scum player may not use this to force a win for their team. (This is to prevent the obvious scum play of having the scum occupy a diagonal so that you physically can't remove all of them without removing every row and column.)

The Town wins when all of the scum are dead.
The scum win when one of the following occurs:
*Deadline runs out.
*All living players are in the same cell after dead-player movement.

CONCERNS:
*The size of the grid, the number of scum, and the number of players are
really
hard to get right, especially since the whole point of the setup is mass death. Too large a grid and you lose that effect (unless you make it so that players die if their row OR their column are removed). Too many scum and it becomes trivial to win. Too few scum, and it's not really a Mafia game (in this case, I'd say two is too few for this kind of game). Too many players, and it's not Mafia either - picking three scum out of a game of 18, really? Plus I've learned the hard way that Nightless games want lots of scum anyway...

----

Alternative version of the setup! Designed with either/or in mind instead of both/and.
3 Scum
10 Town
and a 4x4 grid

PHASE 1: GRID PLACEMENT (it's the same as above)
Pregame, one player is randomly chosen to place themselves on the 4x4 grid.
Players may talk during this phase.
Once per player, each player who is on the grid may choose one player who's not on the grid, and place them wherever they want.
In the interest of expediting the game, a player who is not on the grid may ask the moderator to randomly place them on the grid. (They can then place one other player on the grid.)

If deadline for this phase passes, everyone not assigned gets placed randomly.


PHASE 2: GRID DEMOLITION
Each player on the grid is attached to a row and a column.
These rows and columns may be "cut off". Players are removed from the game if EITHER their row OR their column are cut off.
Players vote on rows and columns to cut off. Cutoffs occur at a majority threshold. If a player votes for the row or column they are in, their vote holds double weight (the threshold does not change).

When a row or column is cut off, the grid collapses back into a contiguous whole. In other words, you cannot subdivide the grid into mutually inaccessible parts.

At the start of this phase, the scumteam cuts off one row or column of their choice. There are therefore seven remaining "lynch" targets.

There is one deadline for this phase, and it does not reset. If this deadline runs out, the scum win.

Each player who is removed from the game has the option of moving one living player to an adjacent cell on the grid. An eliminated scum player may not use this to force a win for their team. (This is to prevent the obvious scum play of having the scum occupy a diagonal so that you physically can't remove all of them without removing every cell.)

The Town wins when all of the scum are dead.
The scum win when one of the following occurs:
*Deadline runs out.
*All living players occupy the same cell (after dead-player-movement).

CONCERNS:
*Same as above, plus now I'm worried more about the diagonal play.
Last edited by Vi on Fri Aug 11, 2017 3:14 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Thu Aug 10, 2017 1:34 pm

Post by Cabd »

I am here
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Have retired for good; Life is too busy to have time or energy for mafia. It was fun~


And then, a Miracle, a Dance Game and a flight of fancy struck, one more game into the abyss
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Thu Aug 10, 2017 1:59 pm

Post by fferyllt »

egoposting. Will take a look tomorrow. Mental bandwidth is stretched tonight!
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Fri Aug 11, 2017 12:18 am

Post by Bicephalous Bob »

In post 0, Vi wrote:Pregame, one player is randomly chosen to place themselves on the 3x3 grid.
Once per player, each player who is on the grid may choose one player who's not on the grid, and place them wherever they want.
In the interest of expediting the game, a player who is not on the grid may ask the moderator to randomly place them on the grid. (They can then place one other player on the grid.)

If deadline for this phase passes, everyone not assigned gets placed randomly.
My first thought is that townies should all request to be placed randomly on the grid since scum are the only players with pregame information. The first player should hold off picking anyone as not to give scum a chance to shape the game, especially since this:
The scum win when one of the following occurs:
*All living players occupy the same cell (after dead-player-movement).
stops all ways town can get an edge/break the game I could think of.
When a row or column is cut off, the grid collapses back into a contiguous whole. In other words, you cannot subdivide the grid into mutually inaccessible parts.
I have a hard time visualizing this. When a row is eliminated, the squares don't disappear until their columns also get cut off, right?
At the start of this phase, the scumteam cuts off one row or column of their choice. There are therefore five remaining "lynch" targets.
This has the same drawbacks as a n0 kill, but to a lesser extent.
There is one deadline for this phase, and it does not reset. If this deadline runs out, the scum win.
Can't see this ending in 3 speedlynches.

I think I'd like this setup better if players could talk and prematurely vote on the first cut while the grid is filled in, although it might increase the chance for a breaking town strategy.

Is the large kill count the sole reason for having a small grid with multiple players per cell? This concept could easily be applied to a 4x4 13-player jigsaw.
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Fri Aug 11, 2017 3:10 am

Post by Vi »

On phone so what is articulateness.

The idea of the players placing each other is based on trying to do better than random. If that sounds suboptimal, how is that better than how any other game works :V

The scum win condition you highlighted is an end state; town can't get a break on that.

Rows/columns collapsing only occurs when cells are completely removed. I put that into the first setup by c/ping from the second one, sorry.

Letting the scum get one cut is their sole "edge" in the game and it does not eliminate players.

Players can and should absolutely talk during both phases of the game. It's kind of silly to have the whole players-placing-players mechanic if it's all done blind and mute. I can see how that wasn't obvious and I apologize.

The last statement is why the second setup exists. I wasn't sure which one was better.

Edits made to first post to reflect clarifications. Sorry about confusion.
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Fri Aug 11, 2017 4:17 am

Post by Gammagooey »

Vi wrote: Each player who is removed from the game has the option of moving one living player to an adjacent cell on the grid. An eliminated scum player may not use this to force a win for their team. (This is to prevent the obvious scum play of having the scum occupy a diagonal so that you physically can't remove all of them without removing every cell.)
How would this work with multiple people dying at once?
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Fri Aug 11, 2017 4:29 am

Post by Bicephalous Bob »

Eh, most misinterpretations were a result of bad reading on my part, and I wasn't particularly clear either. This was especially ambiguous:
stops all ways town can [get an edge/break the game] I could think of.
-----
Letting the scum get one cut is their sole "edge" in the game and it does not eliminate players.
Never mind that. I thought scum had to decide on a cut before they could test the town for their opinions, which is obviously not the case.
The last statement is why the second setup exists. I wasn't sure which one was better.
The second setup is different to the first in other ways, though, and it does allow multiple players on a single cell. I'm suggesting to take first setup, add a one-player-per-cell rule, and increase the grid size to 4x4. This makes diagonal coordination for scum much harder, since dead players get four possible moves at most.
When a cell is cut off (row and column), the grid collapses back into a contiguous whole. In other words, you cannot subdivide the grid into mutually inaccessible parts.
This doesn't specify which direction the cells move (to the top-left?), and whether the moving cells keep their half-cut state. An alternative is to make the grid collapse only if an entire row or column of cells is eliminated.
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Fri Aug 11, 2017 11:47 am

Post by Vi »

In post 6, Bicephalous Bob wrote:
The last statement is why the second setup exists. I wasn't sure which one was better.
The second setup is different to the first in other ways, though, and it does allow multiple players on a single cell. I'm suggesting to take first setup, add a one-player-per-cell rule, and increase the grid size to 4x4. This makes diagonal coordination for scum much harder, since dead players get four possible moves at most.
I don't think first setup and one player per cell work out. Since you have to remove rows AND columns, it's trivially easy to ensure that one player dies first (remove row and column for precision accuracy!), then one player dies second because maybe they're on the same row but the only one in that row in that column, and then after that people start dying off in larger numbers. Which generally is the opposite of how good games with high death counts go. It would be a lot more in the spirit of the setup to go second setup, one player per cell. And to be honest one player per cell seems arbitrary anyway, and I would rather have the rule that allows dead players to move living ones to break up overcrowded cells and stick with a theme of Town trying to manipulate the board so all the (so-called) scum can die in one swoop.
When a cell is cut off (row and column), the grid collapses back into a contiguous whole. In other words, you cannot subdivide the grid into mutually inaccessible parts.
This doesn't specify which direction the cells move (to the top-left?), and whether the moving cells keep their half-cut state. An alternative is to make the grid collapse only if an entire row or column of cells is eliminated.
Top-left sounds right. I want to avoid situations where parts of the board are either cut off or unreasonably difficult to reach.
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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Mon Aug 14, 2017 12:44 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

Breaking strategy for town: during the placement phase, identify one player who you believe to be town, then place everyone else in the same square and kill them simultaneously. (Placing players contrary to this would be a scumclaim.) You'd want to place the "designated townie" first to prevent scum placing them in with everyone else (revealing themself but likely winning the game in the process). Unless I'm missing this, EV is 10/13 (the odds of correctly finding one townie in a 13-player game), or 76%, and actual win rate in practice will be higher as long as everyone's willing to go along with the strategy. (Actually, I suspect there may be an even "better" strategy than this one, but this one is quite good enough to show the setup to be townsided with a well-disciplined town.)

We probably need to add this to the "common mistakes in setup design" thread (or perhaps have a separate "common breaking strategies" thread?). This isn't the first setup design I've seen broken by killing all but one player simultaneously.
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· scam · seam · team · term · tern · torn ·
town
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Tue Aug 15, 2017 6:32 am

Post by Vi »

Fair point. What would happen in the second setup if no two players could occupy the same square?

Alternatively what if players were put on the grid "randomly"? (with some nudging to stop potential bad setups)
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Post Post #10 (ISO) » Tue Aug 15, 2017 6:38 am

Post by Bicephalous Bob »

I came up with that strategy as well, but I figured that's why this scum win con exists:
All living players are in the same cell after dead-player movement.
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