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Art by Tikitik.
2016 was the biggest year for Circus Maximus in a long time. Major efforts were made to revive the subforum and they seemed to be very successful. Since the subforum has been treated like a joke for so long, I wanted a record of what's been going on so that people can reflect on the games they've been in and maybe learn a thing or two about those they didn't play. This Part 1 will focus on Official and Outside Contact games. But first, here's a word from our one of our moderators:
At the beginning of this year, Circus Maximus was in a bad state. Very few players were signing up for games, and it got to the point where a series of threads were posted in first Firebot and eventually Inside Scoop discussing how to make Circus a viable games forum again. I can honestly say that that thread was probably the most pivotal turning point I've seen over the last decade or so for Circus (RC) and led to a ton of great ideas for how to expand Circus's exposure to the rest of the forum in a way the Site Staff would support. It was from this thread that I created the concept of 'Official Mafia Games', which come with banner rewards for the winners and have more forum-wide exposure via announcements and game previews posted as site articles that allowed people to get interested and sign up for games. The resultant game that I created was Metagame Mafia (hosted with Walrein), and that game got almost 80 signups, more than any game in years. This led to a revival of interest in mafia and helped inspire a surge of smaller games and bigger playerbases, which has greatly helped in moving Circus back towards a stable, functioning strategy games forum the likes of which do not exist elsewhere on the internet (believe me, I've looked!).
I have great hope that the continuing Official Games (2Official2Mafia was also a great success this past winter) will help drive new players consistently to the forum and help spur the creativity and activity that keeps Circus such a fantastic games forum. If you're reading this for the first time, all I'd say is this: try reading through the forum introduction and a game or two, and see if you like what you see! I know that's how I got into Circus many years ago, and I think you might be surprised that Circus has a lot of interesting games (not just mafia!) for all.
And now, the games. If a game was hosted by one person and doesn't say otherwise, that person did the write-up.
Metagame Mafia was the First Official Mafia Game (TM) in Circus's history, and it was honestly a bigger turning point for the forum than it was as a game itself. The game was designed, essentially, to appeal to as many possible people as it could: it was played only on the Smogon forum, making it easier to read through; it was Pokémon flavored, and roles worked similarly to how they did in the games, making it more accessible to the (many) Pokémon players on this forum; and it carried a lot more pre-game exposure and banner rewards. Fortunately, lots of players signed up, and we eventually ran the game with a whopping 58 players, a larger player size than any other game in Circus history had reached.
In terms of the game itself, it was a fairly standard Village (The Rest) Vs. Two Mafias (OverUsed and Ubers) Vs. Wolf Duo (Anything Goes). The early game played out roughly as anticipated, with Yeti leading the village and collecting claims, putting the village in a good position via lynching one half of the wolf duo (acidphoenix) early and focusing down the OverUsed and Ubers (led by Mega Blaziken, user Blazade). Yeti got unlucky in the midgame, however, as both village status healers failed to claim their roles, so Yeti sheeted an Uber status healer (Memoric), giving the Ubers the village spreadsheet and allowing the Ubers to off several important village roles, including Rotom-H (DTC), who was about to kill another mafia after nabbing a Life Orb from an Uber corpse (Asek). This gave Thetwinmasters (the remaining Anything Goes, Moody Bibarel) the opportunity to boost his stats to high heavens while the mafias killed Yeti and numerous other important villagers, including village leaders porygon-3 and Jalmont. The endgame resolved quickly once the village (now led by Wobbuffet, user billymills) decided to lynch Arceus (antemortem), one of the few remaining roles that could harm stat-boosted Moody Bibarel, and eventually Blazade decided to just throw the game Thetwinmasters as punishment for the other factions ganging up on the Ubers so much all game.
Overall I'm very happy with the excitement this game brought back to Circus, though as a game itself it was far from my best work and definitely could've used some revamping. Ultimately a game's success is measured not in brilliance of ideas or even quality of hosting but in excitement and interest generated by the game, and on this measure Metagame Mafia was an unqualified success.
The idea behind this game was inspired by Card Game Mafia. Instead of having six different kinds of mafia function in card form, each faction in this game exemplified a different mafia staple: lynching, gathering information, defending, controlling, lying, and supporting.
The game was pretty one-sided due to the current wolf meta, that is, people's refusal to kill off wolves. This was exacerbated by the fact that one wolf was actually a team of six. It could have gone much differently because there were a lot of opportunities to start killing off the Magmas, but there are some design changes I'd have made too. It wasn't an amazing game, but I think a lot of people had fun with it, and it was very interesting to observe as a host.
One of the more memorable things was the Aquanauts actually stealing the Muds revive and using it on one of the Magmas, which let them win a perfect game. The biggest play that actually benefited its team was when Magmas used the lie generator (usually a very weak role, I swear!) to trick a new player into thinking that his vigilante power was gone forever. I named Josh as MVP of this game, not because his play was perfect, but because as a newbie he got a lot done for his team near the end of the game.
Election 2016 Mafia was going to be heavily influenced by luck from the beginning, given the low playercount; in a game with eleven people, losing even one of them is devastating to that player's team. Regardless, I wanted to host it because at the time the election was still an entertaining sideshow instead of the next season of American horror story, and I wanted to capitalize on the madness to make an entertaining mafia game. Due to flavor constraints the Republicans (the village, due to logistics rather than desire) heavily outnumbered the Democrats (the mafia), so to compensate I made sure that when there was only one Democrat left, they would receive massive buffs.
Unfortunately, the Democrats couldn't catch a break all game. billymills stepped up to lead the Republicans very early on, and a combination of effective power role use and a bit of educated guessing allowed billy to quickly identify and eliminate the Dems one by one. The final Democrat, Jalmont, managed to delay his death by a few nights, but it was really just a formality, and he was eventually lynched to end the game.
ALLCAPS was a game I had conceptualized months prior as a compilation of the greatest hits of my prior games in the MAG series (MAGMAfia, AQUANAfia, ELECTRO Mafia, and MAGMAfia 2). I posted signups with an incomplete design as far as the mafia teams during a huge lull in Circus activity; the game didn't even get enough signups to begin with the numbers I had originally slotted, so I trimmed it down to fit the tiny playerbase. This meant I left too many roles on the mafia and not enough on the village. The idea was to cause the village to mislynch several times by having confusing roles and obvious mislynch bait roles, such as the four village-aligned rogues, but this worked better when the village had more than five people. The VILLAGE consisted of notable roles from previous games, or quality fakes, the ALMOSTS were roles that had never actually made it into my MAG games, and the ALLSTARS were notable players famous for shenanigans in the past.
I randomized the playerlist and wound up with almost all the Circus mods on the mafias. This resulted in a mix of randinspects on the mods getting them lynched and mislynches by the village when nobody on the village wanted to speak up to either give a result or give a claim that might've made the lynch less certain. The role that literally was mislynched by the village in a prior game was copy-pasted into this one and mislynched, AGAIN. The village play in ALLCAPS was not particularly stunning up until Aura Guardian, the leader, died. This left LightWolf, a man who had no real reason to ever be sheeted, on the village sheet as a mafia mole. He and teammate UncleSam had a fairly consistent spat about LightWolf's mole play and, unsurprisingly, UncleSam raged at the host about game design while never hosting a standard himself in years. The other mafia had taken heavy losses but, in an extremely convenient twist, their by far best role had been randomized to Gale, the lone not-a-mod on their team, and he stayed alive. This left Gale both with a BPV and the ability to outvote any one person. With the village lynching off their own rogues, not a single rogue was successful, ultimately crippling the village's chances by removing the intended returning numbers.
The biggest play made was the ALLSTARS making somewhat of a greed play, trying to martyr the ALMOSTS' kill and block it with the village BG when Gale was not killing one of their team anyway. Village BG, newcomer Blazade, was swayed by Gale to not BG LightWolf, resulting in his death and the subsequent elimination of the ALLSTARS. Gale went on to win against the village due to his robot-voter role. The remaining few villagers at the time of the stab on LightWolf put up a valiant fight, but ultimately their remaining roles were too weak to overcome Gale's overpowered role. This game gave rise to the meme "sub me out of this farce" as well as the existential question of how exactly does a storied Smogon dot com mafia backup work?
RWBY Mafia came at an extreme low in activity for Circus Maximus—the Official Game was coming soon, but it hadn't been announced yet, so the forum was a bit of a ghost town. The intent behind RWBY was to spark just enough interest in mafia so that the Official could hit the forum hard; despite the fact that RWBY only managed to garner 15 players, I'd say it was successful on this front given the massive success of Metagame. The game itself was relatively simple: four informed factions (Team RWBY, Team JNPR, Ozpin's Group, and the Antagonists) competing to be the last team standing. The last member of each team would be able to use their dead teammates' powers one time each, so being annihilated early wasn't necessarily crippling.
Of course, in a 15-man multifaction game, luck's bound to play a big part. Ozpin's Group lost two members on the first cycle, putting them into turtle mode the rest of the game. Team JNPR jumped out to an early lead thanks to arguably having the best roles out of the four factions, but RWBY and the Antagonists managed to team up to dethrone them—this despite the Antagonists losing their best role, Paperblade, to a name-targeted instakill performed by Yeti (which still makes me laugh to this day). The Antagonists wound up being the first to fall, owing in part to beginning with one less member than the other factions; this left a 3-way race between JNPR, Ozpin, and RWBY.
Cycle 6 saw a coalition of RWBY and Ozpin deciding to eliminate JNPR's final member, owing in part to a minor host error (oops) allowing the players to deduce the alias of the final JNPR player, Acklow. This was accompanied by the killing of RWBY's Yeti, leaving the game at a 1v1 between rssp1 of RWBY and zorbees of Ozpin's Group. Unfortunately for zorbees, rssp1's role was born for such a situation: his lynch vote grew more powerful each time one of his teammates died, leaving him certain to win through the lynch.
Underground Mafia 2.0 was the unofficial sequel to Underground Mafia, a game I hosted some years back. The theme was to follow the The World Ends With You and instead of being an item-based game, it was originally geared to be beginner friendly. It retained the HP mechanic that I tend to employ in most of my games, though I kept HP really low and made it even harder to cheese kills through lynches and night actions. I ended up revisiting the idea after the first Smogon Official Mafia game was hosted, as I felt inspired and I also had set this aside as a bucket-list game that I never ended up finishing. The TWEWY theme was scrapped in favor of a Fire Emblem Fates flavor, since that was a relevant game at the time and the whole "underground" thing still fit with the content of the game. The idea was to include a hidden wolf faction that would have limited power but would also have moles in the two other major factions. The first of the two major factions, the Hoshido, was, in essence, the village. They had quite a number of powerful lynching roles and were weaker on the back-end in terms of night roles. The Nohr were a semi-disorganized mafia that had to unite through a chain, which allowed the hidden wolf faction, Valla, to mole. Given the nature of the setup, the idea was to intentionally make it both easy to mole for Valla but also if played effectively, Nohr would be able to catch Valla out. This was done with one of the roles in Nohr being informed of a mole amongst their group.
This is where things get interesting: the game was played out as it usually would, though the lynches were intentionally pushed back in terms of lethal damage until around the 4th day cycle in order to prevent early mislynches but also to give Nohr some momentum to form up and begin hunting for the mole. However, not everything went as planned. A few of the players in Nohr who were key to making sure that the chain would connect ended up going AWOL, and so Nohr had to play the guessing game in figuring out what roles they had. This effectively put them at a severe disadvantage, even with Hoshido having a similar problem. The caveat being that Hoshido at least had active leadership who were consistently involved with the game and in the process were able to make good plays. Unfortunately, because Nohr was easy pickings for Valla due to the poor organization of the faction, Valla was able to gradually increase their momentum in classic hidden faction fashion to the point that Hoshido became mince meat.
The top players of the game would have had to have been vonFiedler (Valla), Walrein (Nohr), and Blazade (Hoshido). Each pulled the weight of their respective factions, and aside from von, had the latter two made even the slightest adjustments to the plays they had planned out, they could've easily cinched a victory. Unfortunately both Walrein and Blazade had to deal with idlers in their factions and that made the loss all that more brutal for them, but they held their own and were movers and shakers and for that I believe they were the best on their teams.
BYO was a direct response to UncleSam's infamous ranting in ALLCAPS: if the player(s) had such a problem with the game design, THEY could submit the roles. We'll see how balanced that is. I also wanted to do another post restriction mafia in the vein of April Fools joke but successful game BIGSANDS 2. This features a bonus competition with two winners, one who guesses the rest of the game's PRs and one who executes their PR the best. I felt the inherently unserious nature of BYO would lend itself best to a PR game. Twin came on as a cohost when it became clear the game would be Huge, and I intended to be a bit stricter about just what kind of shenanigans roles I'd let in but I was a bit puzzled by the definitions of some of the roles sent (Circus doesn't use the same terminology as PS and other sites for certain things, so I had zero clue what "black goo" was... cough :yipes: or how black goo worked properly). So I let it happen. Some roles were decidedly neutral, some roles were intended for mafia or village (super vanillager comes to mind who could win the game for the village with X villagers left alive, chronic idler RODAN was randomly assigned this role), others we put on teams as needed.
This meant a recruiter made its way onto the Strawberry mafia. I had met four of the Strawberries irl as the game began, and they got their team PM as we were hanging out, revealing several Extremely Broken Roles in conjunction with each other: Ho-Oh, who could create items that were the roles of the winning team of a real-time mafia, and the recruiter. They met up with BLACK GOOMY vonFiedler and recruited him, which meant all the black goo recruits became Strawberries. They used Ho-Oh to make several recruiting items, including "convert entire team to Vanilla" which we thought would be completely hilarious to do irl. "Imagine if an ENTIRE MAFIA TEAM just suddenly was eliminated, then appeared on the village!" It was some top kek. I don't think black goo should work the way it did and what is priority tho, but, the Strawberries converted their massive black goo-powered team to the Chocolates, then converted the EVEN BIGGER Chocolate mafia to the Vanillas. Once they lynched the last wolf who could not be recruited, after recruiting several neutrals and wolves, the 43/48-man Vanillas won the game.
The side competition was, once again, won by the person who talked to me most during the game to guess PRs and reguessed when they were wrong. BIGSANDS 2 was jumpluff, BYO was UncleSam, who would call me during work "just to guess more." jumpluff was a strong candidate to win Best PR Execution due to their brilliant posts as a Circus anthropologist, but due to health issues, the only original Chocolate who had died prior to mass conversion and done a great job with his PR, Whydon, overtook them in voters' hearts. A lot of roles in this game were extremely innovative and dynamic ideas, but could not be properly executed due to the utter shenanigans of the Strawberries. If this game had not allowed recruiters/converters, it would've been very different, and I think a BYO2 should strongly consider either allowing all shenanigans, or banning all WC-changing roles. I think it was an enjoyable bundle of chaos, overall.
A lynchpin mafia is a game where two factions start allied until one player, the lynchpin, dies. In this game the village was moled pretty hard by Steven Snype while the village lynchpin was relatively helpless due to having to hide.
Wayne Bradiest was the culmination of a series of games I had run over the past two or so years. All the games were built on similar mechanics—a free-for-all in which you attempted to kill specific enemies in order to win. Instead of simply dying when they were killed (though this is how it should be), players had HP and Attack stats, and could make attacks on other players during each cycle. The nature of the game made politicking an extremely important aspect, and to compensate I made sure to include a mix of self-sufficient roles and roles that were decent on their own, but devastating when used in conjunction with others.
The game was a tale of alliances right from the get-go. UncleSam jumped out the gate by immediately gathering enough info to form an alliance of like-minded players, eventually gathering a core group of about eight users that would work together on actions and lynches. A counteralliance, headed by Blazade, eventually sprung up in an attempt to prevent Sam's group from becoming too powerful, but he couldn't quite amass the numbers, and most of the uninvolved third-party players tended to vote with Sam anyways. Hilariously enough, the first winner, Aubisio, was a member of neither alliance (and had in fact mostly won through the alliances' combined targets happening to coincide with his own), but after that the wins came pouring in for Sam's group. Eventually both alliances exited, whether through victory or death, and the remaining players were left to duke it out. Of course, those with the most self-sufficient roles wound up eventually winning the day in this endgame scenario.
It can be said that all of the game's winners played well—they won, of course. There were, however, notable players on the losing side of things as well. The anti-Sam alliance, and in particular Blazade, Thetwinmasters, and Dullagamur, all tried incredibly hard to circumvent Sam's influence, though it was eventually futile. vonFiedler was extremely active in the early stages before eventually being screwed over by a combination of bad luck and askaninjask's paranoia (rip). Finally, the most hilarious player of the game was easily King_, who took EXTREME offense to Sam's attempts to kill him and managed to hang on with 1 HP for like 2 cycles before finally being put down; honorable mention goes to Memoric, who actually [I]died[/I], was revived with like 1 HP, and managed to somehow survive an extra cycle before inevitably dying to a stiff breeze.
The main concept behind Dead Mafia was that once a player died, they would get a new role in death. This way every player would be able to play the game from beginning to end, even if they were a Day 1 lynch or Night 1 randkill. The game was designed to be a test for the format and a beginner style game, so none of the roles were too ambitious. I did try to make small tweaks to existing standard roles, but nothing too game-breaking. The hardest thing to work with in this game was how to effectively make deadtalking roles. I think that was the wonkiest part of my game design, along with a kingmaker survivor.
I'd say the game went fairly well, especially for my first attempt at designing a mafia game and hosting by myself. The early game played out pretty much as I expected, aside from the fact that no one died for the first two cycles. The main problem with people's gameplay was that they didn't utilize the deadtalking roles enough. While they were the first roles to die on the village, their Death Roles still had versions of communication between Dead and Alive players. The village also didn't try to unite in Death, so they were largely disorganized until the final cycles.
The stand out players in the game were the Bradiest co-hosts, Walrein and Yeti, representing the Mafia and the Village, respectively. Walrein was able to mole the Village for almost the entirety of the game, although I believe he made some questionable decisions that put the Mafia in far more danger than he needed to. Yeti was able to create a pretty strong village circle aside from letting Walrein in and still remained suspicious of him throughout the game. Her main flaw was not getting together the Dead villagers.
I thoroughly enjoyed this process and am looking forward to a sequel game in the coming year.
Weeb Mafia was a relatively standard game with top down design, a few new and interesting roles, and a swingy dynamic with fresh types of counterplay. The Bad Anime were the Village, and their numbers, stability, and power were designed to be undermined by conflicts created by their strange roles and by precision Mafia kills. The Good Anime were a weak Mafia with flashy and direct roles, while the Kids Anime were designed to be able to gather information and ultimately exploit it to make the most of their nuanced roles. Finally, there was a Neutral, which won by completing a series of sidequests using a different role for each.
The game played out very dynamically and remained close to the end. As the village lost crucial leaders early and struggled to clear players, the Good Anime managed to work their way into the decision making process and focus efforts on the Kids Anime, who weren't active or aware enough to stop them. Clever independent actions by a few villagers and the rare poor decisions by the Goods made their fight a little harder, but their effective arguing ultimately won them the game after all the village claims had been forced out in the open.
This was UncleSam and Yeti's first game as a couple and their first time on an informed faction together, and their decision making and influence forced mislynches while protecting their team and ensuring the win. Thetwinmasters showed effective organization and deduction as an early village leader, and Jalmont followed strong by coordinating village night actions behind Yeti's back as she was trying to mole. Ultimately the game, while successful, showcased the faults of a largely apathetic village.
Jojo's Mafia was a passion project. RODAN and Asek designed the game using flavor as a basis for all the roles, with this coming BEFORE balancing changes were made. The most important thing to the game was to make the roles true to the source, which was accomplished nicely. The source material, Stardust Crusaders made for some very interesting and unique roles that hadn't been seen within Circus before. Unfortunately, this may have made the game too easy to solve from a town perspective, especially coupled with all of their powerful roles and ability to clean each other. It did turn out to be surprisingly competitive, however, with a lot of groundwork needed on the village's side to effectively find the mafia, and the mafia's chance to straight up win the game if they managed to lynch DIO made the game possible to win at most stages for either faction depending on the game state.
The game played out in an interesting manner. The mafia got off to quite a bad start and never quite recovered from losing some powerful members early. The village was initially lead by vonFiedler, who successfully proved his status as DIO and, after his death, the coordinated efforts of shade, Walrein, and the multitude of late-game town leaders helped them to organize efficiency and clear the mafia out with relative ease. The wildcard present in the game was seen in Jalmont's neutral, who was in quite a good position to win after they lost a chance to join either of the factions. Unfortunately for Jalmont, the mafia being either unsuccessful in killing targets or straight up idling their ability to kill lead to the process of elimination lasting long enough that he couldn't finish off the two odd extra town members he needed gone to have a good shot at winning. The game closed out with Jalmont being lynched and the town claiming the win.
The MVP of this game was vonFiedler—coordinating the town around him and proving himself as DIO proved vital in the chain of cleans that followed and created the village circle that would ultimately lead to victory. Jalmont also played very well and put himself into the best possible position to win given his situation, but the stars unfortunately didn't align for him.
Keep an eye out for part 2, which will follow soon!
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