In its third and allegedly final iteration of Death Note, enchant has sharpened the brilliant mechanics that marked DN I and II to create a unique forum game experience that, as Radical Rat points out, "blurs the line of what qualifies as a Mafia game". Every single role brings with it singular challenges. Every player is invited to act creatively. Whether you're a vanilla taskforce member, assistant, detective, follower or Kira, the game presents you with many possibilities of being impactful and decisive to your team. The game mechanics are still largely a mystery, as there is no common path to take: the paper trails that leads taskforce to Kira in one game might lead to a red herring in another game. The stakes are much higher now in signaling dynamics between Kira and followers, which leads to a permanent state of tension. Playing taskforce in a game with no flips is like trying to find a needle in the haystack. Playing follower is walking on eggs: can't push your kira, can't make it too obvious the connection between the two of you. Kira and detective are the roles that carry the most weight with it, as your entire team depends a lot on what you do or don't do. But no matter who you are in the game, you're guaranteed to be dealing with tasks you never dealt before in any game of mafia.
It is a game that lived up to its name. It was a chaotic game with many great moments such as the people overthrowing the moderator at the last hour, and a fakeclaim in MeLo that almost worked.
Also, a reminder to folks that a little over a month is left for nominations, and several categories could use more nominations. Be sure to get them in before the deadline so judging can start promptly.
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fireisredsir has very unexpectedly made an awards ceremony to conclude his walrus game. It was very well crafted, and included a lot of statisticis that I am not sure how fireisredsir came up with, much less tracked. It is evident that there was a lot of thought and effort that went into this ceremony, and the post is both very interesting and also pretty funny
I kinda feel bad for making this nomination, because hellbooks already won last year, and because it's the second nomination for this award that I've made this year off a game I modded, and because hellbooks had decided to not post this publicly. However this post is just sooooo amazing that I kinda feel I
have
to nominate it. hellbooks basically spent the entire game crafting a sort of ambient story to the actual game, making various recurring jokes (and non-recurring jokes, presumably), and then at one point she just made this huuuuuge big wall post where she just activated the pay off of every single set-up and joke at once and it's kinda hilarious but only with context, which I think is the best kind of hilarious.
Aside from the fact that this scumteam just crushed the town and won with 3 scum alive, what really amazes me is just the level of distancing they did, which was absolutely incredible. They looked completely unpartnered from the very beginning, as basically the first few pages of the game are composed of jaw-dropping theater. For the rest of the game though, this scum team positioned extremely well, chose their dance partners well, and were basically able to pretty much glide to victory while members of the town fought against each other. It's no wonder several members of the town thought the game was lost from the moment the IC pair would go down, even before it went down. This scum team was just that hard to detect.
The previous holder of the Lairon slot (Cephrir's slot in this secret alt game) had absolutely no WIM because they were conftowned, and replaced out pretty quickly. On the other hand, Cephrir picked up the conftown slot and really put a lot of effort into it, basically running the whole Day 3 phase and making the only viable lim be the correct lim on scum (the only scum lim the entire game). Overall very good replacement work here.
While this game doesn't really have a "story" type of flavor in the traiditonal sense in the same way that Pizza Kids had, it definitely had some of the most immersive flavors I've ever seen in a mafia game. The weird dream descriptions, the role PMs, the pictures that accompanied the dreams, all contributed to a feeling of being trapped inside a dream land, as did the fact that the flavor was a crucial part of the game, and not something that could be skipped like in other games. Over all, I feel this game provided a really unique and flavorful expeirence.
Although this game had a bit of a balance hiccup in giving the scum team the ability to deny the town two whole eliminations (one from the gladiator mechanic, and one from the vig), it still managed to have a really fun implemetation of a cool mechanic (giving PRs to townreads), and was mechanically enjoyable IMO.
This game had very cool mechanics and roles which overall felt relatively balanced and fair, and that's no mean feat for a theme game with 22 players. Game had really solid play from both sides throughout, and the winning side felt up in the air for most of it.
Very solid setup design. Felt quite balanced, and there was plenty of room for role and setup speculation (as seemingly intended by the title "Shell Game"). Interesting roles which gave pretty much everyone something to do mechanically.
