There are some similarities to Angel Nightless here (in particular, there's an obvious HURT: /HEAL: tag usage), but the setup seems notably different in nature as it's mostly about saving people, rather than about throwing them out. (The "hurt" action is there as a safety valve against trolling scum; I suspect that most of the time, it would be a bad idea to use it. Both "hurt" and "heal" leave the town/scum balance of food the same if used correctly, and shift it by 2 if used on the wrong alignment, though, so they may turn out to be equally viable.)
The "two townies must live" rule seems to be necessary to avoid breaking strategies (such as choosing the most obvious townie and forcing everyone to pile up their food onto that player). That's a bit of a pain, as it makes the (otherwise very simple) setup a bit harder to explain, but I guess we'll have to live with it.
Can anyone see a breaking strategy here and/or does anyone think this is unbalanced? If not, I'm considering running it.
Pick the two towniest players and make everyone pile food on them? That has an EV of 10/21 but I suspect it'd be higher in practice.
The other thing I'm considering is voting on players to "suicide bomb" someone else-- spend enough food to kill both at once. (Any unauthorized transfer of food would be punishable by death.) I haven't calculated the EV, but I suspect it will be the same or almost the same, since the suicide bomb strategy requires identifying two townies and can be accomplished by identifying no more than two townies.
It doesn't seem unbalanced. It seems like, no matter how you slice it, the goal of the game is "identify two townies", and you're just giving them more toys to play with in order to do that.
It's always the same. When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who's going to die. You don't know whose children are going to scream and burn. How many hearts will be broken. How many lives shattered. How much blood will spill, until everybody does what they're always going to have to do from the very beginning... SIT DOWN AND TALK!
Yes, that's fair enough. (You can also play the game as effectively a 5:2 nightless, which is also close in EV terms, at 3/7 = 9/21. So breaking the setup hardly seems to help, although it does help a bit.) Voting mechanics – and this is a voting mechanic, really – are pretty much just there to adjudicate what happens if everyone starts acting for themself; if there's a broad consensus on how to act, the specifics of the mechanic hardly matter.
That has an EV of 10/21 but I suspect it'd be higher in practice.