I still don't understand the argument that that behavior makes any less sense from a regular bear puncher. sure, they may guess wrong, but then are they guessing or bluffing? like, it's clearly a ploy, not just an earnest claim, so why would the potentially to be caught lying change anything?

I'm with Razor on this - the keeper only knew 1 person, right? So, it's still limited, but does allow for the successful ploy, like Zinger did. I mean, we all thought it was too obvious that he couldn't have been the leader, but, there was more than enough doubt. Zinger did a great job with the distractions.

A regular bear punchers can't immediately start mirroring the opinions of the leader because they have imperfect information. That would make their guesses likely incorrect. Note how easy it was to differentiate between town power roles and vanilla town this game, not a single one of us didn't know it was one of them because of the ploy. It's true that turning the game into a coin flip gives town a good chance of winning, but in the end it eliminates a lot of the value of the normal part of the game and makes it boil down to WIFOM.

I'm honestly surprised we came as close as we did.

so? how would being incorrect have changed anything? in fact I think Zinger's play would've been better if they had been incorrect, because that creates questions as to whether they're the actual leader or whether they're bluffing. and given that that's an option, they can always switch their targets later without losing anything.

I'll admit that, from a scum perspective, it seems more likely that Zinger's a power role because you know they were right. but at the time it was argued that that was obvious from a town perspective, and that's just silly.

it wasn't a coin flip at all. you had plenty of additional information to work with. you had the voting record. you had the interactions. and honestly I think from all of that it was pretty clear that it was Tevish. or rather, that it wasn't Zinger, and since you'd reduced it to Zinger and Tevish that it must be Tevish.

zinger was either the keeper/leader, or very lucky with his guesses. The former is more likely, which makes him a significantly safer guess than most of the people in the game. If he had thrown in some incorrect answers then his bluff would have been meaningless and we would have had a harder time guessing.

I fail to see how you remove zinger as possibly being the cult leader.

Yay!! We win! Good game all! #BearPuncher4Life

It's easy to say from the mod's all-knowing perspective that my play was too obvious, but given we won in no small part thanks to my play, I'd beg to differ. But I respect your opinion nevertheless.

I played mostly with one goal in mind, protect Tevish by any means necessary.

As the game Drew on and it looked like we might lose I took a more active role in trying to win than in trying to protect Tevish, but that was still important on my mind.

I think Rag hits the reason my play worked right on the button: I was pretty much a guaranteed power role. Any way you slice it, that's more likely to hit your target than picking one of 3 not-guaranteed roles.

But yeah. Fun game.

I found the play to be rather obvious as well (as stated), the timing was just too convenient. When I made my round 5 missions, I proposed the team I did in part to gather information, but also because I thought the chance of assassin guessing Tevish was higher than the chance of the team I made failing the mission.

I realize I'm part of the reason round 3 didn't have the same team, but I think you guys did a blunder there by not forcing it through. The lineup was kind of rough, but I even said that I would submit the same team unless a strong incentive to do otherwise would show up.

Dunno - I mean, it was kind of obvious, but the way Zinger played it off, and stopped being quite so obvious when it was started to be mentioned...he clearly did a great job keeping it away from Zinger. As I said before the final call, I thought it was one of the two of them, but he did such a good job with confusing me, that it was not obvious enough - I was around 45/55 on Zinger/Tevish - so, not quite a coin flip, but close enough.

will there be another one?