[SETUP] Mafia on a Grid

[Bicephalous Bob]

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.

[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.

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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.

[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.