[Complex] Survivor: Pantheon [Congrats Mist and Noraa!]

[VashtaNeurotic]

Due to some delays (and us wanting to schedule the best start for everyone) it is unlikely that the game will start on the 19th. We will be sending out a scheduling form with casting PMs later today and announcing a day and time as soon as we have a good handle on what works best, we hope for this to be sooner rather than later.

[VashtaNeurotic]

We are still waiting on a handful of response but it seems the game is likely to begin on either June 21st or June 22nd with deadlines around 5 PM PST/8 PM EST/1 AM BST though this is subject to change.

[VashtaNeurotic]

After consulting the availability of the players, replacements and moderators, the game will begin on June 22nd, 2021 at 6 PM PST/9PM EST.

[VashtaNeurotic]

Survivor Pantheon: A Retrospective

by Vash and Monty

With Survivor: Pantheon complete we figured it'd be a good idea to look back on it with thoughts on everything in it, what worked, what didn't and what lessons can be learned to improve future games. We plan to look at how the challenges, twists, items and other mechanics affected the game. This retrospective won't focus too much on the players of the game except to support a larger claim about one of the previously mentioned aspects of the game. Also note that anything in this color were said by Vash and in

green were said by Monty

. So with that being said, let's begin.

Part 1: Challenges

Challenge by Challenge Thoughts:

Spoiler: Premerge

Challenge 1: Empire of the Five Suns

The general idea of this challenge was to have an intentionally longish game that would make players decide whether they wanted to be cooperative or adversarial with the players on the other tribes. On this count I think it was a huge success. A good portion of players really enjoyed the challenge and there were a variety of outcomes. Also while it was tighter than we wanted to, all games did finish, which was helped a lot by the pregame availability form we sent out, as that's how we decided who'd be in what game.

However, the main change I'd suggest for this challenge can be summed up in one word, canals. The aura was confusing and led to pretty much every group miscounting at one point or another since it meant a lot more math had to be done. It also meant that my double check of each game was substantially longer than it should have been. I think without Canals (or simplifying them substantially) the games would have taken a lot less time. It also might have been smart to cut the total number of rounds in half, but nothing broke here and I'm happy about that.

I will also say that the google sheets really help with this and any board game based challenges that don't already have a site to complete them on should be done on google sheets.

Challenge 2: Loki's Treachery

This challenge was essentially a logic puzzle, and the average time for the challenge was acceptable but not ideal. I think the biggest issue is that while the puzzle certainly worked, the solution wasn't incredibly elegant and the best method after a bit was almost certainly to guess and check, which is the least fun method to do a puzzle. A long puzzle with a fun journey is fine, a long puzzle with an unfun journey is significantly less fine.

Challenge 3: Kokopelli's Symphony

No real notes on this challenge. All groups completed this challenge in an ideal time frame with a clear winner. It also introduced players to a bunch of songs that I hope they liked.

Challenge 4: Cave of Wonders

While it was also a twist but was technically a challenge. Some people realized that the challenge was a bit too convenient after they submitted. I do think we could have worded this a bit better, as the goal was to have all the players on one tribe have an idol clue and the other ones have to make due with whatever hints we added later. However, due to our wording, this actually led to the 2 people who were the most "selfless" got rewarded since there was an 11 way tie at the lowest amount, which we really did not expect but I'm fine with. It also left 2 players without an idol clue on the greedy tribe, which I think is the main downside of what happened. Still very much do like the idea of challenges that affect who gets swapped with whom, but I don't think this should be the way its done.

Challenge 5: Test of Thoth

The idea of this challenge was to combine two challenges where people were likely to be good at one but not the other. This is rather difficult to do well, and this challenge mostly became about solving the maze half. In hindsight the maze should have been swapped out with an easier version I also had access to. I also feel a challenge like this might be better post merge, as it rewards someone who is good at both halves, rather than punishing people for not being good at one.

Challenge 6: Scenes from a Dream

Some people really liked this challenge, others had it as their least favorite. I think as far as subjective challenges, it went well, there were some pretty funny jokes in it, and I think the feedback was very constructive. It also didn't require any IDing info, which in hindsight I think should be important for any creative challenge in an anonymous game, since it allows you to share the entries themselves with results.

Swap Challenge: Cassandra's Questions

I think this overall went well, but some grouping decisions on answers (like putting all the weapon answers together since someone answered weapon but not what kind) certainly impacted the results. Asking for specific people/things can work around this though. Also some rules about what doesn't count as an answer should have been stated since unless something just wasn't an attempt to answer the question, we gave points for it. Nothing major but considering how we ended up with a tie in the final results, definitely impactful.

Challenge 7: Rumpelstiltskin's Riddle

Our time estimate was a bit off since the more people involved, the slower this goes, and some groups took a while between asking questions. If we said this was going to be 2-3 hours I think it's perfect, though we did have to have a few mod conversations about our official answers to some questions, and whether certain words should be counted as the same. There's nothing like a late night discussion on the etymology of a word with your fellow mod.

Challenge 8: Odin's Runes

This challenge was simple and pretty successful I'd say. I do think some groups blew this challenge out of the water. To the point where maybe it would have been better to use 5 runes instead of 3 runes. But aside from that I'd make no changes. It also allowed people to bond over a challenge which I think is important in the premerge.

Challenge 9: Here Be Dragons!

If you just accept that this is a challenge that requires a 48 hour window to schedule the board game matches then I think it works great. A lot of people seemed to like this challenge in the Merge Survey, which is good, and we tried to cover a variety of skills. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing more challenges like this in the future.

Challenge 10: Daedelus Made a Maze

This challenge was originally meant to be a team game of Santorini, but after having several 48 hour challenges in the premerge, and Santorini being a game that really only works best in 1 on 1, we decided that instead using the Maze and keeping Santorini in reserve as a tiebreaker game would be best.

As for the challenge itself, I think it went fine. It wasn't super well liked, but it was not a disaster, and while one of them was over time, everyone completed it. I think that's all you can really ask for a backup challenge, and it went over better than some of the challenges we had already run.

Spoiler: Postmerge

Challenge 11: Zodiac Race

This challenge took most people a while to get their head around since the rules were very long, but I'm not sure they could have been simplified further. Using somewhat nonstandard thumbtacks rules also threw people. Still once people had a handle on it, I think it went well. The people who won weren't just the most popular people around, which was certainly a scenario we were worried about.

Challenge 12: Anansi's Tale

This challenge went fine. I will say that I'm very happy the win was a dominant one since like Cassandra's questions, every little decision in what counts as a full point vs half point can matter. Still I think a lot of the answers here were very clean cut, but could have been even clearer.

Challenge 13: Tall Tale Contest

Everyone submitted for this challenge, and we got some really creative submissions. It still required 48 hours overall, but giving 40 hours to come up with something definitely seems a better way to do this unless all judges are going to take only an hour to grade and you can immediately roll over into tribal council. The one issue I have is that to enable more mediums of submission we allowed IDs to be broken, which meant some great entries weren't shared until game end.

Challenge 14: Baba Yaga's Toilsome Trials

I love the concept of this challenge and I think it almost went perfectly. Unfortunately Puzzle B (aka Nurimaze) was one of the solvable puzzles and the rules were a bit too much compared the others. Even those who realized it was possible didn't solve it. Also it probably would have done a world of help to bold the resubmission line, since some people solved a puzzle and could have submitted but instead waited until the end to do so.

Challenge 15: Opposites

Much like the previous challenge, a bolding of the line about connections going a certain way would have helped a ton. Also the path of getting the very last word connection gave people a bit more trouble than we were expecting, and swapping it out for another one would have been better. Still outside of that it was a fine challenge.

Challenge 16: Merlin's Apprentice

Worked out fine I'd say. This was meant to be run live (which would have also been packaged with a special 1 hour live tribal) and I think it works better that way, but it was still okay the way it was run.

Challenge 17: Five Golden Things

There was some criticism of the buying aspect of this challenge which I think was overblown. We figured that the only situation someone might buy something is if they had nothing else that fit the category, and even then they'd probably only get something cheap, and no one even bought anything. Still it probably would be fine to eliminate that aspect or put a cap of like 5 dollars on it.

This challenge essentially became a creative writing challenge, with the winners making up a lot of backstories about items while also trying to be realistic. This went fine this time, but I do feel it could have some pernicious effects depending on what your players are willing to lie about, especially since the more personal a story, the more likely it was to get high marks (not to mention the potential impact if a judge thought you were lying about something you actually went through). Still it was fun to actually run a Taskmaster challenge and there were some very fun submissions to read here.

Challenge 18: Natural History Catalogue

This challenge went through a lot of rewrites in playtesting. Originally it was way too easy with full internet access, to way too hard with just the wiki links but no list, and I'm ultimately happy with where it ended up. Maybe more creatures or a longer list could have been utilized but overall it went very well, and making people look over mythical creatures is always fun to me.

Final Challenge Part 1: Where in China is Sun Wukong?

Really enjoyed making the panels for this (or rather looking at the panels after I made them) they looked beautiful. I also think it went pretty decently offering players a choice between categories. I do think that perhaps the world mythology category was a bit too broad, and the exact difficulty was a bit hard to gauge for each questions even though it definitely did increase as the questions went on.

Final Challenge Part 2: Labors of Hercules

In hindsight might have made the haiku labor a little easier, and taken away one of the math magic puzzles, but overall I think this was a fun challenge. A clear deadline, an easy to determine winner, and challenging players decision making as well as ability to complete tasks. Very happy to learn that this works well as an individual challenge rather than just a tribal challenge. Though I think I could have done some better tying into the previous challenges in the game with the tasks.

Final Challenge Part 3: A Story of Your Own

90% of this challenge I think was great. People seemed to like the text adventure aspect and most of the little pieces of flavor sprinkled throughout. Though making it a speedrun does encourage people to skip over most of that.

However, the resulting challenge was unfortunate. No one had trouble with the dials puzzle until the finalists did (though other people were tripped up playing for fun later on), and as the only non brute forceable puzzle it cogged up the works. It did not help that after we thought Jesus had given up and we went to sleep, he actually just took a 3-4 hour break and finished it before we woke up. Which meant that the only thing to do from that point was let Hades go until either that now extra long (and unspecified to Hades) amount of time passed or he gave up, the latter occurred. Strangely if Maat & Hathor had won Part II we would have been able to stop either of the other finalist after an hour, but that didn't happen.

This did change the challenge to be more about perseverance than answering jury questions and doing a text adventure, which is not necessarily a bad skill to test with the final challenge, but not worth the journey it took us on.

In Hindsight there's only 3 changes I'd make:
1. I'd reduce the symbols on the dials to 5 or 6 and make it clear symbols don't repeat in the combo, making it a lot easier to brute force but still not the ideal way to go about it. Or add a hint about how to get to the solution after a number of incorrect guesses.
2. Move the paper hint to another shrine, or just not mention the specific letters on it as they were unnecessary for its effect later and would have tripped people up less.
3. Put a time cap at wherever we felt was too long to wait for a result, though I feel with the above two changes this would be unnescary, but at least is a safety net for when things go wrong.

Still I like this challenge and the site I used: https://www.inklewriter.com/ is free and very useful for any future text adventure challenges.

Overall Challenge Thoughts:

Spoiler:

From what I can tell the most maligned challenges were definitely those involving puzzles because the puzzles ended up being too difficult. I like difficult puzzles myself because I'd much rather lose by 5 or 10 minutes on a 30 minute puzzle, than lose by 1 minute on a 5 minute puzzle since so many small things can influence the latter. However, the puzzles here went to the point where while some people would complete them, other people would just not, and there's a huge difference between spending a lot of time and completing something vs spending a lot of time and still not completing it, the latter feels just terrible. I also think that especially premerge, puzzles do little to build comraderie/adversity among tribesmates and I think the best challenges do that as well. I'm not sure I can make a statement on puzzles in general aside from have a cutoff for when players can't complete the challenge ALWAYS. Another takeaway is that I probably should not create or playtest puzzles beyond a basic outline since I seem to have no good guage on what difficultly will lead to a good challenge vs what difficulty will just make everyone have a bad time. Lastly, more bullet point lists and bolding important sentences would be easy ways to increase challenge readability.

Hilariously most of the other challenges that were people's favorites ended up taking 48 hours, which is a good thing, because if you are going to spend that much time on a challenge, it better be worth it, but also worries me since a bunch of 48 hour challenges is very likely to slow the pace of the game if you don't also have twists going on that keep the pace going. I also think we had a wide diversity of challenges and a lot with novel concepts, but a good portion definitely need a few tweaks before they'll be as good as they possibly can be. The last thought I have is that the less IDing info necesarry for a creative challenge, the better, as the best part of those is to share what you made at the end.

Part 2: Idols

Individual Idol Thoughts:

Spoiler:

Artemis' Arrows (Skill Idol)

The competition for who got it worked out how we expected, we didn't want these to come into play until round 3 or 4 and they did. Unfortunately they rarely got used since Poppy never needed them and attended a lot of tribals, so they just slowly dwindled. Also maybe a challenge where it was easier to steal the best score might have been better for the idol to transfer ownership, but I don't think this result was bad or anything.

Mjolnir (Luck Idol)

We wanted an idol that would likely be discovered in a PM or a public post via a word filter and well, this worked to perfection. This idol was hilarious since we decided to have it appear 2 rounds after it was thrown, and since it was thrown premerge it appeared at a tribal that Jael wasn't at. Do wish it had some more impact (which it certainly would have if thrown at F13 than F15), but it was always going to have to be a bit of a lucky throw.

Ring of Mudarra (Rules/Endurance Idol)

The idea of this idol was getting rewarded for making a low information choice (and also having to spend about 3 hours doing an endurance challenge) while also not just letting it do absolutely nothing. As such this idol became a walkie talkie where if one player was eliminated, it was simply a half idol. But both players made merge, enabling Cerberus' good early choice to pay off.

Pot of Greed/Phoenix Feather (Greedy/Selfless Idols)

The idea of these idols was that they could only be used for 3 rounds, but would offer you something for playing them correctly (with the "Selfless" idol being unable to be used on yourself). One got used correctly and one didn't, which I think is a fine result. The Selfless idol essentially needed to be leaked for anyone to get it though, so perhaps making the password easier to figure out would be a good idea. Also basing the password off of players' passwords is a theoretically bad idea, and you definitely need to make sure that people can't just crack them easily and there are more permutations than you can count.

Muramasa (Power Idol)

Loved this idol. The hunt was beautiful to watch, and everything was very well calibrated....except for the very last riddle. I'm fine with the last riddle being a bit more difficult as it is the one to unlock the idol, but picking a relatively unknown Scorsece film that wasn't even in the top 40 of the box office the year it was released was....a bit too much of a stretch for anyone who wasn't already familiar with the material. That being said I'm not the most dissapointed with the idol not being unlocked until merge with a hint since we didn't actually want a seventh idol in the game and this essentially being the merge idol worked out well. Also I think the restrictions worked well for such a powerful idol (though it's power could have been negated with a vote steal, though Jael would still have been immune in that case).

Monty here--the biggest thing I think should have been included with the Power Idol is a material number of vote steals automatically in the game. With the idol in the game alone, it was a little too OP without the possible nerf of a vote steal.

Overall Idol Thoughts:

Spoiler:

We had a variety of idols hidden in a number of new ways, while a few tweaks to how some of the later ones were hidden might have been better, I'd say these all worked out from alright to great.

Part 3: Divine Interventions

Individual Divine Intervention Thoughts:

Spoiler:

Pyramus and Thisbe

Really enjoyed this twist, enabled a lot of communication and people getting to know people on the other tribes, but with less numbers than a shipwreck so it wasn't extra overwhelming.

Lent

Solid twist, forced a decision, could have caused a move to be made while people focused too much on the future, but didn't.

The Prophet's Hadith

This was fascinating to watch, since it happened with uneven tribes it meant that cross tribe picks were going to be key, and they definitely caused people to make decisions that accidentally hurt their allies, along with some people choosing chaos.

The Moirai

Was an interesting twist, but coming so close to F11 meant that a coordinated strike was likely, which even though Jael had an idol really shut them down a good 4 rounds ahead of time when they already were having a rough time due to not going to TC. It definitely added an extra dimension to the game but might have been more interesting if you couldn't coordinate votes, since you might still get a majority and a lot more questions of "wait who voted for me" would happen.

Tower of Babel

Was just sort of...funny. Like it didn't impact anything much but I couldn't stop cackling at the public posts.

Year of Two Winters

This DI was one of the few that a player actually picked (more on that in the overall thoughts) but it really just ended up making discussion very difficult. It's fun to watch in a situation where there is only chaos, but here it just sort of put the nail in the coffin for the bottom of the game.

Overall Divine Intervention Thoughts:

Spoiler:

I think the Divine Interventions were amazing premerge, they added a lot more things to consider and kept the pace of the game from dragging. However, past merge, especially at F7, most DIs would have done nothing at all since most of the items were gone. In fact the ones that could impact the game heavily (Defense of Ulster and Dia De Los Muertos) were veto'd so they wouldn't occur.

Also completely underestimated the amount of vetoing that would happen, a lot of the time a random event rolled where if all 3 token holders chose one, that wouldn't have happened. However, it makes sense that few events actually benefitted certain positions whereas ones that were bad were much easier to decipher.

Overall I do like the pseudorandom system with input from players, but I think there are ways to implement it to better tailor twists to the point of the game you are at and enable some of the more....twisty events to occur.

Monty here--I think overall, these DIs gave players a lot of agency, where they could do what they wanted with them. I can see a world where more chaotic players go for broke and boost events like Dolos--I'm fine with how these twists turned out, and I would run things without many changes to the token system.

Part 4: Other Twists

Spoiler:

Cave of Wonders/Personality Swap

I really liked swapping the tribes based on a decision made in a challenge. Obviously this exact version shouldn't be done again, but swapping based on a challenge that doesn't just...split people up on challenge prowess is a an idea I like to see and I think worked better than just pseudorandoming the tribes.

Draft Swap

I loved this, there was just enough miscommunication for the tribes to be interesting without them 100% being kill x player tribes while also allowing people to talk through decisions ahead of time. People had to make decisions, and I think we picked a fair challenge for this to determine the order.

Monty here--most of my insertions are to add areas of nuance or disagreement, but I just want to say that I also loved this swap.

Third Swap

This swap wasn't actually completely random, we took the Receivers from the previous challenge and put them on one tribe, and took the Givers and put them on the other tribe, and then put the sit outs on the larger tribe. Only idea was to split up any hard pairs for the last tribes while also keeping the numbers evened out. It worked okay and I do like it slightly more than a pseudorandom swap. Perhaps it would have been better to try and make sure players who hadn't met before would be sure to meet here though.

Big Brother Finale

I was worried that this would slow the pace of the endgame but I don't think it did too much. It enables the finalists to really think through their options, their case and add a little bit of drama, at least through the first 2 challenges, depending on the gamestate. It also gave players more times to work on torchwalks but that's kind of just a minor bonus. I think this format can still be done with a F3 and not just an F2 you just have to decide whether to take the top 2 competitors from the challenges, or just cut the bottom competitor from each challenge.

Monty here--I'd make sure that there were three 24 hour challenges used here, as I think more time spent on the challenges would have made things drag a bit. Even going to a tiebreaker challenge would have been suboptimal for that reason.

Hydras

Even if disclosed ahead of time I'd still count Hydras as a twist on the game. I think most of my thoughts on hydras have been stated before but they remain unchanged. They are an advantage, but to access that advantage a lot of extra work has to be put in, I also believe that with any good forethought from mods, they won't form pairs that are going to be so much stronger than the normal playerbase that they should be banned (like no one is gonna ban the top of ELO or Crazy Scores for being too good at survivor and I don't think you are going to create a hydra that is objectively stronger than that on accident). They allow people to either mentor newbies, have a unique experience with a friend or play when they otherwise would be too busy to. I don't even think letting people pick their partners is a bad thing, even with potential IDing I don't think it's worse than ID issues with just normal play, and it makes sure you don't trap 2 people in a chat for months that they won't enjoy. We also got 3 different hydra experiences in this game and while a hydra did win, it was by the barest of margins in probably their best FTC matchup. That being said, given there is a significant population that has a problem with hydras, they should be more of a rarity and likely the next time we see them should be in an all hydra big brother or a half hydra legendary esque game.

Monty here--hydras have been the focal point of discussion for the listmods since the game ended, so expect to see more about them coming soon. I echo Vash's thoughts, and feel like hydras, where used, should prioritize bringing people into the game, not excluding them. So, for example, hydra matches should usually have someone who is going to directly benefit, either from scheduling difficulties, or experience gained, from being in a hydra.

Part 5: Miscellaneous thoughts

Spoiler:

Anonymous Feedback Form

There was an in game Anonymous feedback form, it was interesting early on but it rarely got used past week 2 of the game and would need a constant reminder to like...actually work. But it was interesting to experiment with.

F2 Decision

I liked having an F2 in this game, it provided a competitive FTC that focused on 2 different playstyles and ended up being a 5-4 so it was rather exciting. The one change I'd make is use capital letters when announcing it in the rules and point it out early on so players get it into their head, since a lot of people assumed an F3 despite the F2 being in the rules.

Lack of multi-elimination rounds

I think the one thing that could have helped this game was just one or two multi elimination rounds or fitness challenge esque rounds. This would have ever so slightly increased the pace of the game (allowing a few of the less interactive challenges to be dropped) and would have not had the curse of Hito happen. Like we couldn't predict that the same tribe would go to tribal so much multiple times, but not going to TC certainly caused a some disengagement or otherwise hurt players and you have to be prepared for that possibility. It also would have made merge at 11 work a bit better as with single eliminations, merge at 13 wouldn't have been the worst thing.

Monty here--I'm more inclined to let folks roll with the punches in this situation. Winning repeatedly, just like losing repeatedly, can be a blessing or a curse in Survivor, and creating situations where folks are incentivized to throw challenges potentially isn't a bad thing, from my view.

The Spreadsheet

CreativeMod's spreadsheet is a godsend, once setup is done, tribe swaps, TC results and so many other things are a lot easier to do. Like most phase changes just required me to be around and took 10-15 minutes in the worst circumstances. Also spreadsheet skills are remarkable for tallying scores for the more calculation heavy challenges and the table maker was one of my favorite tools for posting results....once I realized it existed.

Part 6: Main Takeaways

Spoiler:

There are a lot of things here that were unique to Complex games--mainly the items and twists in play. Those could have some tweaks, but worked well overall. Overall, there was a LOT going on, but it still felt relatively balanced, and twists and items ended much better than they could have. In general, twists and challenges tended to favour player agency (even if it was sometimes random draw that made that happen), and that made for a better game.

The biggest thing we'd take away from running this game was the challenges themselves. While, on the whole, they worked well, there are some improvements we'd make, the most significant of which is setting more hard caps on challenge run times, and doing a better job of scheduling rounds, so there aren't multiple 48 hour challenges.

Agree with Monty, aside from difficulty balances and being ready for when that goes wrong, I think most things worked well together. Hard caps on challenges are a must, and being able to schedule team up challenges that aren't 48 hours long would be a godsend in terms of enjoyment and pacing, though I'm not sure how easy that will be in the future.

[VashtaNeurotic]

It really sucked to lose the last and most important challenge of the game simply because Jesus had more time to spend on it than I did.

I do have to ask what exactly you mean by the more time part. The way I read this would imply that we forced you to stop at deadline (since then your time alloted would be less than the time Jesus took to do the challenge), which we didn't, we told you to take as much time as you needed or until you decided your were done, should we have let the clock run out after the latter happened? If you mean continuous time, well, I'm not sure how much you spent continuously working on the challenge, but we do know that more than a third of Jesus' time was spent not working on the challenge, which is decent chunk of time, but still might make the continuous time available more than yours.

If you mean neither of those, what do you mean by Jesus won simply because he had more time to spend on it, and aside from putting a time cap on the challenge(which I agree should be standard) should we have done instead?

Ftr I do agree on the more playtesting for the last challenge, we thought it was good enough but with more testing (probably by releasing to the specs early) someone would have gotten stuck at the dials in the way before you two did, and even if a cap didn't occur, those other fixes probably would have happened.

[VashtaNeurotic]

For Taskmaster, being able to buy stuff was only one issue I had. The other big issue was that the judging criteria was simply too vague. I even asked the mods to what extent the descriptions mattered, if at all, and the response I got was "however much the judges want it to matter" which was ??? Like, how am I even supposed to know what to do for this challenge if I don't even know what exactly the judges are basing their grading on?

All of the subjective challenges had this issue but I think Taskmaster was the worst offender for sure.

I mean that's why we had the judge profiles for later challenges. So you could get an idea of what the judges would value most, or try to think through what a reasonable person would find to be the weirdest item, etc. Perhaps creative challenges in the future should also give some rubric for the judges (I do seem to recall OLAAT from the last non-anon having 3 categories for the story written), but I do worry that will restrict the kinds of approaches people do, and you could still have the issue of "but what does x mean" with those categories. Some level of subjectivity is an inherent part of creative challenges, but I also find that creativity and humor are just as valid skills to test as doing a puzzle or board game, if somewhat harder to measure. I also don't see guessing what a judge will like more to be all that different from something like guesspionage where some of the questions were just about personal preferences of those polled, or guessing what a juror will value at ftc.

[VashtaNeurotic]

All of the "less communication" twists have the problem of making nothing happen essentially. If you can't talk you just do whatever you were doing before that. Pyramus and Thisbe was great for exactly everyone but Chaos. Maybe it should've ended early the way Tower of Babel did? Makes it less impactful but all I remember thinking was "thank fuck we aren't doing TC like this." Year of Two Winters did the same thing as it did in PvWvC where people couldn't talk to even discuss a move so moves didn't happen. IDK if there's ever a way this twist doesn't end that way. Maybe if you put people in 3 person boxes and let them move around every 12 hours like it was The Genius or something, there has to be more mixup to pass messages.

Yeah, perhaps ensuring all rounds it could happen had 48 hour challenges and suspending it for tribal council would have been the proper way to go. Looking back on it, any communication twist that persists into tribal council is going to just disadvantage to bottom of the game. I am curious how they would work out in a situation where there isn't an already established bottom, i.e a tribe swap or merge with no clear majority already in place.