[SETUP/EV] Soulbind

[BNL]

2 Mafia 7 Town (or maybe 3:10 can also work)

Pregame and every Night, scum pair all but one of the living players together.

Town must lynch every Day. When a lynch happens, the pairings are revealed. If a player in a pair is lynched, the other player in the pair is killed, and there is no Mafia NK. If the solitary player is lynched, the Mafia must kill a player the next Night (and that player is excluded from the pairings.)

Thoughts?

Also the EV for this game seems hard to calculate, so I'd appreciate if someone can calculate it for me. I believe Mafia can do some WIFOM stuff that can decrease the EV than just pair randomly.

[Awoo]

2-7 vanilla / 3-10 vanilla have very bad town EV's as it is, and surely this new mechanic will only lower town's EV further. I don't know if this is really worth calculating for all the trouble that it is

But if the mafia are forced to lock in the pairs pregame and they can't change them, then things get a little bit more interesting and town's EV starts going up. So basically it becomes "lovers mafia + 1 except the mafia pick who the lovers are and who the +1 is".

[callforjudgement]

I have a theory that "WIFOM cancels out" here and with perfect play from both sides, the result is identical to scum picking at random; however, I don't know for certain that that's true, it's just a guess.

If that

is

the case, the setup is probably townsided. (It's quite similar to a 7:2 in which scum kills are made at random and can hit scum; that gives it a comparable EV to 7:2 nightless, rather than 7:2 vanilla. It'll be a bit lower, but 7:2 nightless has an EV above 50%, and a practical winrate much higher than that.)

However, in practice, I think scum are more likely to be able to out-WIFOM the town than the other way round. So perhaps that brings things into a more balanced realm. I guess I'd put this setup as "I have no idea where the balance is, but it might be interesting to run it and find out, at the cost of potentially having to apologise to the losing team for running such an unbalanced setup".