TWG CXIX: Expecting Luigi to Win? Too bad, Waluigi Time! (Post Game)

[davy]

Congratulations Wolves

Role reveal:

Nana1Popo2 - Sacrifical Lamb
threalmathguy - Miller
ThatHiddenCharacter - Human
BlackDragonSlayer - Human
Toby - Master Wolf
SpecsFlyer17 - Herring
TheZeldaPianist275 - Redirection Wolf
Oricorio - Human
XiaoMigros - Chosen One

Phase by phase breakdown

Night 1
Wolves wolf THC.
TZP attempts to redirect BDS to math. It fails.
Luigi (Xiao) seers Oricorio green
Waluigi (Wolves) seers Oricorio green

Day 1
Specs is lynched

Night 2
Wolves wolf Xiao.
Luigi (Xiao) seers Toby green
Waluigi (Wolves) seers BDS green

Day 2
Oricorio is lynched

Night 3
Wolves wolf N1P2.
TZP redirects Xiao to Toby. This is successful.
Luigi (Xiao) attempts to seer TZP but is redirected to Toby. The result of his seering is green
Waluigi (Wolves) seer THC green

Day 3
BDS is lynched.

Game design

This game's origin was the idea: what if split personalities, but as a normal TWG instead of a faction game. Problem with that was that if the humans each had a second account that would basically make all of them masons, which would make the game quite wolf sided. So instead I opted to just have the seers have an alt account.

Having designed that, I envisioned the game having 10 players. Two wolves, two specials and 6 humans. This would give humans two mislynches, while also not winning with just one successful lynch. When the cap for this sign-up was 9, I needed to add something to the game to keep winning after 2 mislynches possible. This is where the Sacrifical Lamb came in. I still had a human special slot free, and by giving them a revive (especially one that could be used before and after death) humans would be guaranteed another mislynch, as long as the SL wouldn't wait too long with claiming.

Since the game revolved around Seering, I didn't want to make them too weak by adding painters to the game. Since the seers couldn't die, I also didn't want to make them too strong, so I added the standard Master Wolf / Miller package. With wolves also having a seer, I wanted to make sure a blue result wouldn't guarantee them finding a special, so I added a Herring. However, this meant that humans could confirm a random human by seering the Herring, so I added that the human seer seers blue players green.

With this, wolves still felt a little underpowered, considering humans had an immortal power that could work towards their win con, while the power that wolves had could not. So I gave the wolves a power that would reduce the power of the human seer ever so slightly, since it only worked once, it would only work if the wolves knew or correctly guessed the seer, and they wouldn't know which player the result was on.

Having done that, I had a look at what claiming strategies could be employed this game. I prefered if this game became an alliance game, since we haven't had any of those since the revival. Going through the options, I concluded that the CO claiming was optimal play. If the wolves didn't counterclaim, humans would proof their seer was the human one and set up an alliance with the SL still behind the scenes. If the wolves did counterclaim, humans could lynch both claimants, and they would still have one mislynch available to lynch the other wolf, at the cost of not knowing which seer was the true one.

I never seriously consider the SL claiming before the game started. When it happened in game, I briefly took some time to figure out why: The claiming special would always die, but the one that didn't claim could stay hidden. With the CO dead, at least the Seer could still talk. With the SL dead, a confirmed human would be lost including their voice.

Of course, with the CO having claimed, the wolves would be guaranteed to use their redirection power successfully, but since it was one use only, and humans would not know when it would be used, I did not consider that a significant risk to having the CO claim.

As should be expected, some things still failed to catch my attention before the game started. Originally, I was going to inform the wolves if their Redirection was used successfully, but when the game had started, I realised that would make it an additional investigative power for the wolves, so I opted not to inform them. Despite that, Toby still managed to use the Redirection power as an investigative power, as you'll see.

I also didn't realise that the SL's power could be used to confirm the CO if the CO is (pretending to be) dead. The SL being unable to revive specials was something I added to the game so that the player revived would not just be an extra confirmed human. When BDS and N1P2 discussed it, I deemed it to be fine, considering the state of the game (where Waluigi was barely trusted at that point anyway), but I may have designed it differently if I had been aware of this fact.

[close]

I was originally planning on making a big post game (hence the big game design section), but I've unfortunately fallen quite sick today, so I'll just post some highlights then go to sleep. Hopefully I'll be able to write a player analysis tomorrow.

Highlights

The Waluigi seering someone blue was a genuine slip. I was yelling at my screen for the entire time that the wolves were discussing this strat.

I applaud N1P2 for taking up the role as alliance leader in his first game since the revival. A suggestion to improve upon is to not be so trusting of unconfirmed humans. If BDS had been a wolf, you would likely have screwed up the game big time for the humans, and all the info you ended up leaking to TZP ended up being quite useful to the wolf team.

Toby used process of elimination to successfully deduce that Xiao was the CO. The Xiao wolfing was chosen because it would come as a surprise to the humans, and TZP and Toby were hoping to frame BDS for the wolfing (which ended up happening in the end).

Because N1P2 asked Waluigi to seer Xiao, and then switched to Toby a little later, wolves had a hunch that he'd asked Xiao to do the same. They faked a red seering on Toby to make him seem more towny.

TZP slipped big time on day 2, where he revealed he knew Luigi was confirmed because Waluigi claimed to be THC, even though this information was never revealed to human TZP. N1P2, the only one who could have known for sure that human TZP shouldn't have this info, failed to capitalize on this and it went by pretty much unnoticed.

In case anyone is still doubting it: The " ?" thing was certainly Toby slipping up and not an attempt from Waluigi to frame him.

With the redirection still available, wolves redirected Xiao to Toby in hopes of getting a green result on TZP in addition to the one on Toby. This worked flawlessly.

For a moment, I though Toby was giving the game out of his hands when he put suspicion on math as he and TZP were planning a wolf rush. Fortunately for him, math wasn't swayed to vote him. Generally, I'd suggest just keeping your mouth shut when planning a wolf rush.

The final lynch came down to town failing to attempt to control the lynch. In lylo, it is very important to get town on the same page, and to do so quickly. Instead, BDS spent the final phase accusing Toby, without checking if he could get anyone else on board, while THC was inactive for most of the phase. On the other hand, TZP had been nudging math towards a BDS lynch for a while in PMs, so with BDS refusing to reveal the CO, that was all that was needed to sway the one human needed for a majority.

TZP was fully planning to sack Toby and play day 4 lylo if necessairy. This could have ended quite badly, as Luigi was strongly considering seering TZP again, and then TZP would have had to spend the entire lylo phase explaining why his color changed.

Player Analysis

SpecsFlyer17 – I liked your involvement in the strategy discussion. Also I wouldn't be so hard on you for the day 1 lynch. Day 1 lynches are usually not very well thought out, and this one was orchestrated by a wolf to begin with.

Oricorio – Shame your mind was occupied with other things for most of the early game. I think it was a good idea to be a bit more calm with your posting after lantern game. Sure, it made you seem wolfy now, because of how different it was from lantern game, but going forward, players should realise that neither playstyle in indicative of you being a wolf. The lynch on you was mostly created due to humans questioning your insistance that the Waluigi slip was unintentional. I guess the takeaway is that being too stubborn on something gets wolfread, although being too vague gets wolfread as well, so you'll need to find a middle ground there. Also, I suggest you use PM's more. Getting into another human's good graces is very benificial for the wolves, but don't discount the advantage of not having the entire town turned against you on a lynching.

ThatHiddenCharacter – I know your work schedule doesn't make things easy for you, but I wish you were more active. Unvoting math after Toby's reply was at least a good move, since wolves were definately planning a wolf rush, so at least there is that.

threalmathguy – a bit of a quiet game from you. You narrowly avoided being lynched d1, then didn't have much of an impact until d3. I applaud your attempt at solving the game, and if BDS was a wolf there was a real risk of him just running away with the game if no one pointed it out. I guess the lesson to be learned is when you try to solve the game based on input from another player, that other player should be looked into as well.

XiaoMigros – Uncharacteristically inactive performance from you. Which was a shame, because all your seering results ended up arriving late to the topic, especially the d3 one, though I doubt it would have changed the outcome if it arrived earlier. The only other thing I can say is that you should look at your posting style a bit more when playing an annonymous account, as THC managed to figure out that you were Luigi because of not capitalizing any sentence.

Nana1Popo2 – Good job being the alliance leader at your first game since the revival. A suggestion to improve upon is to not be so trusting of unconfirmed humans. If BDS had been a wolf, you would likely have screwed up the game big time for the humans, and all the info you ended up leaking to TZP ended up being quite useful to the wolf team. Nevertheless, I hope you continue playing and improving on this site. Rising Star Award

BlackDragonSlayer – An unconfirmed player holding all of the information is very dangerous, so you should have expected suspicion would fall on you during lylo at latest. Your downfall this game was, as it is more often, you being too sure of yourself. A human should be willing to engage in a discussion as to why they seem suspicious and try to convince the accusing player that their suspicions are not worth considering (at least, not enough to vote that human). Instead you just shut the discussion down by asserting that this game state wouldn't have happened with wolf!BDS (none of the reasons you gave for that would have convinced human!Me if I was playing this game) and calling any argument against you being nonsensical even into the postgame.

Toby – I loved all the behind the scenes discussion that you and TZP were doing. The blue seering and " ?" slips were unfortunate, but you managed to minimize/work around them excellently. I was close to giving you MVP for being the wolf that took the lead in strategizing the most and for figuring out Xiao was the CO. However, your d3 play was pretty poor, especially the throwing shade at math after THC had voted him. Had that swayed math to voting you (and had THC been online at phase end) that may well have costed wolves the game. Still, you deserve a Honerable Mention.

TheZeldaPianist275 – While you made the biggest wolf slip (calling out that Luigi must've been the human seer after THC was revived, even though only wolf!TZP would know that Waluigi claimed to be THC) other than that (and the Waluigi seering blue slip), you've played a very clean wolf game and was never truly considered a lynch candidate despite that, which is ideal for a wolf. While both you and Toby made some especially good calls (notably you suggested wolfing Xiao when Toby had deduced him being the CO), what pushes you over the edge was planting the seed of doubt about BDS being human into math's mind. This was literally the winning move, as failing to sway him could have ended up causing a Toby lynch, and a second seering of you could have paved the way for a human victory. Therefore, I grant you MVP.

[BlackDragonSlayer]

bruh moment in several ways

Math being a human is incredibly surprising because his behavior was incredibly baffling. Like seriously, you had to overcome the fact that me being a wolf made basically no sense to still think I was a wolf.

[Oricorio]

Damn, town would have won if they just followed my PoE

I was the hero town needed, but not the one they wanted

Also we probably shouldn't overthink things like the Toby slip

[BlackDragonSlayer]

Damn, town would have won if they just followed my PoE

I was the hero town needed, but not the one they wanted

Also we probably shouldn't overthink things like the Toby slip

Oricorio/Specs was just too tempting a pairing and not something I wanted to leave open-ended until late game.

I'm still baffled that people didn't realize Toby was obviously a wolf with how much obvious strawmanning he was doing during the final phase (and he and TZP being basically exactly on the same page, not to mention TZP backing down and poorly trying to cover his tracks almost instantly when I called him out for saying something that made 0 sense). Of course, even if Math had voted alongside me it still would've likely been a KitB without THC present to vote.

Xiao not revealing the seer results early really hurt us the final phase, because it meant we had to spend a lot of the phase arguing among ourselves without anything "concrete" to go on.

[Toby]

That was a fun game

I made plenty of mistakes but I also think I made plenty of great plays

Really really fun gg all and was great having TZP as wolf partner despite him willing to ditch me any second !!

[SpecsFlyer17]

Humans have been awful at true wolf-hunting.

Nothing Special: Wolves win on minimum number of mislynches.

Numbers: Somehow the lone wolf wins.

Assassins: Wolf 1 took down Wolf 2, and Wolf is lynched in a unwinnable situation.

Lanterns: Wolves win on minimum number of mislynches.

TTT: Wolf 1 is lynched via an obvious choice of strategy, wolves win with multiple mislynches.

Luigi: Wolves win on minimum number of mislynches.

We've yet to truly lynch a wolf purely based on hunting.

[Toby]

I did have a tactic day 3 to play a bit chaotic and say things that would make people try think surely he wouldn't be acting like this as a wolf - rather than doing things that just read as human

It was appearing to backfire a lot

I was also drinking most of friday and severely hungover today so that didn't help lol

[Toby]

Also we probably shouldn't overthink things like the Toby slip

You could say that but I also mimicked THC's posts hard and even only went on  Waluigi whenever I saw THC went online on the forum.

I probably should have tried to stick a random slip in that looked like someone else too

But basically it just as easily could have been a fake slip than a real slip.

I did plan to post as Waluigi in topic acting as if I was someone else who didn't realise they were logged in as Waluigi and not their main - but with how sus Waluigi was so fast I didn't bother. I tried to use Waluigi being sus as an advantage where I could

[SpecsFlyer17]

Well played wolves. My initial thoughts:

I guess I had decent reads N1/D1, but couldn't sell them because I was sloppy with my defense. I made a mistake referencing TZPs PMs from Assassins, and I criticized Math's inactivity but not Xiao's.

Horrible Oricorio lynch imo. We had information on him, let alone a green Luigi result. Yeah it could've been a redirect or master wolf, but there's no reason to take that chance on D2. Not happy with that.

Luigi should've posted N3 seer results wayyyy earlier. The bulk of D3 was spent doing nothing, and that set up a poorly organized vote, which screwed the town.

[Oricorio]

Oricorio/Specs was just too tempting a pairing and not something I wanted to leave open-ended until late game.

This is flipless, you shouldn't treat Specs as if he's flipped wolf, especially when you weren't wolfreading me and it should have been obvious that there were no other viable pairings involving me. I'm just not too happy to be mislynched for avoiding what I correctly thought was an obvious mislynch.

Anyway, GG wolves. You may have made a few obvious slips, but deducing Xiao as the seer, wolfing them, and using that to frame BDS is a clever strategy.

[Toby]

Also Specs and Oricorio I hope you don't feel disheartened by being lynched knowing now it was pushed heavily by both wolves!

The Oricorio lynch was definitely poor. Not only because of the green seering but I think it would have been much safer to not be greedy and try lynch 2 wolves in 2 days. It would have made sense to try go for someone who couldn't have been Specs parter, to try and guarantee 1 wolf being lynched as much as possible

[BlackDragonSlayer]

The Waluigi seering someone blue was a genuine slip. I was yelling at my screen for the entire time that the wolves were discussing this strat.

This is very surprising to me. The biggest reason I doubted Toby as a wolf is because I thought Toby was too competent of a wolf to allow that slip. I'm guessing TZP made the post?

THC wolfing was a good pick because it created doubt over whether THC himself would've done that.

Because N1P2 asked Waluigi to seer Xiao, and then switched to Toby a little later, wolves had a hunch that he'd asked Xiao to do the same.

N1P2, why would you have ever asked the seer with dubious credibility to seer the other seer claimant. I don't think he ever mentioned that to me.

We've yet to truly lynch a wolf purely based on hunting.

I think the big issue is that everyone was acting so damn suspicious (this has been true in multiple games), and when everyone's acting suspicious it's hard to actually narrow down your suspects. That combined with a lot of players going with feelings over facts (last game and this game especially) makes it hard to actually argue against suspicious players (though this issue is 100% not a new thing for NSMTWG).

In order to genuinely suspect I was a wolf, you would have not only had to assume wolf!BDS actively shooting myself in the foot rather than just making the sensible plays, and also ignore the fact that none of my possible partners made much sense either (maaaaaybe you could have argued Specs, but I did next to nothing to actually defend Specs or try to steer the lynch away from Specs despite the fact that N1P2 literally proposed lynching Xiao after Xiao's claim).

Math getting more suspicious of me after I released PMs with N1P2 is even more strange.

[SpecsFlyer17]

Also Specs and Oricorio I hope you don't feel disheartened by being lynched knowing now it was pushed heavily by both wolves!

I mean, I had guessed that TZP was a wolf on D1, so this just confirms my original suspicion. It was a good read, I just couldn't sell it because I made some mistakes, which was taken as "grasping at straws", rightfully so.

I was a little shocked that N1P2 jumped on the Vote Specs train. I got out of church to find that both Tobt and N1P2 had voted for me, and I was 15 minutes from dying lol. But good job TZP for starting some momentum against me. I have to work on being more careful with defense.

[therealmathguy]

Since I had been talking to TZP about why BDS was being handed so much info despite being unconfirmed, it got me thinking through different theories and while I was rereading the thread, it all clicked. Xiao being the CO was the ONE possibility that would lead me to not trust BDS, and it happened to be true. I was so proud of that little rant I made. First time I've really gone hard to solve a game state. It just so happens that it was tailored to the only others who were also distrusting of BDS...TZP and Toby...AND it was wrong. 

Sorry team

Low key ban-able offense lol

[BlackDragonSlayer]

This is flipless, you shouldn't treat Specs as if he's flipped wolf, especially when you weren't wolfreading me and it should have been obvious that there were no other viable pairings involving me. I'm just not too happy to be mislynched for avoiding what I correctly thought was an obvious mislynch.

I didn't wolfread you initially, but my perspective changed after discussion in the thread and in PMs with N1P2.

Also, Oricorio/THC was still a viable pairing unless I'm mistaken.

Anyway, GG wolves. You may have made a few obvious slips, but deducing Xiao as the seer, wolfing them, and using that to frame BDS is a clever strategy.

As I said in the game, sensibly speaking me wolfing Xiao doesn't make a lick of sense unless I'm deliberately trying to tempt fate for no discernible reason.