The Circus Maximus 2016 Year In Review, Part 2

Anonymous No Contact Mafia was an experiment meant to test two things: how useful vote analysis is in scumhunting, and what role flexible individual power can play when all explicit coordination is taken away. Each day, players could only communicate through their lynch votes on an anonymous forum. At night, village roles could buy a variety of night actions while each mafia role was meant to uniquely deceive and counter a different philosophy of action choice.

The Village were able to take the win handily, and while an astute few contributed heavily to their success, the Mafia idled and did not take advantage of the many tools they had to undermine the clarity of inspection results or coordination of the villagers. They also didn't behave like villagers or foster mistrust using their voting patterns, proving that reading votes can be effective.

Among the best players were billymills, internet, and shade, who managed to simultaneously avoid suspicion and investigate the right players quickly. In addition, Da Letter El pushed a lynch onto a Godfather role without evidence and was able to succeed. While interesting, the game would have flowed better in a real-time environment, and any future iterations will be conducted over Discord.

I can't say the original idea behind Dragon Ball Z NOC because I was not the one who designed the game. The game's creator, MysticSoul, had personal issues to attend to that prevented him from hosting, so I and jumpluff took over and ran it.

Overall, I think the game went okay, but the atypical rule limiting claims made to four caused the game to play out abnormally. Additionally, a host error when counting votes improperly revealed two of the mafia members, which despite their respectable play prior, signed their death warrant, as the claim limit put them into a horrible position at end game.

My favorite play was probably the mafia's attempt to mislead the town by creating a "fake" inspection result on their own team member. This sort of thing tends to be a minor "let's try to eke out an edge" thing that amounts to nothing, but in this game it actually worked, tricking the town information roles. Unfortunately, the circumstances from above prevented the play from being as cool as it could have been. Other than that, I think the town played well, and a shoutout to Blazade for clinching the endgame.

The main inspiration for Amnesiac Mafia was anonymous no contact mafia, which did away with an otherwise core game element in order to make the game unique, rather than adding a game element to do so. This set me on a path to find what other game elements could be removed to make a game unique, and I eventually stumbled upon the answer: Role PMs. From there, I posted a game proposal and together with vonFiedler I made a nice game. Had it not been for vonFiedler it probably would've been a pretty crazy game, so credits to him for grounding it and making it a playable format.

It was a nice surprise that for my first mafia game since Inventions Mafia, so many people signed up. Enough to run the game twice. Yeti (at least I think it was Yeti) asked if I could run the game twice and proposed that I split the groups depending on each individual player's "Wallpostiness". I agreed, and Yeti also made the groups. Game 1 went really well, in my opinion, even if it got a bit feisty at times, and game 2 was hilarious. Overall, I think that while this proves a game with only NOC idlers doesn't turn out very well, it made it so the maximum number of players got the game they deserved.

Game 1 was very nice in my opinion. As far as I remember, top players were Yeti, who would've ruled the game with an iron fist had it not been for a very effective silence by rssp1, and UncleSam, who knew everyone's roles super early somehow. Game 2 was a clown fiesta.

Acid City's Trouble began as an experiment with a simple goal: recreate Town of Salem from its broken aspect into something playable with the many solutions such as nerfs, buffs, and changes players from the community suggested. Along the way, some other things that weren't part from the original game were added, such as roles not from Town of Salem, or the Night 0 phase. I'd say it's well but probably won't be changed for some time, as it is considered "finished", at least for now.

The first game went nicely, was active, but I'd say I made the mistake of forgetting to add Vanillas (yes, that actually happened), leading the scum roles to have trouble. The second I'd say went in the middle of both good and bad, since inactivity was a big issue, at least some players (for example, KnightsOfCydonia and Former Hope) actually cared about the activity. Both were enjoyable hosting experiences, though, I can say.

ButteredToast solved the game properly iirc, which was really good. I think town would've won anyway and Dullagamur / DLE should get shoutouts for playing well as well.

The purpose of this game was to try and create a NOC game that did not revolve around giving every single player a strong role or leaving many people with vanilla roles. I sought to accomplish this by giving everyone a one-time BPV, which I felt was a departure from typical NOC games that are hosted on this site. This allowed me to include more impactful roles that would give players the chance to make an impact, even if they weren't confident in the whole No Outside Contact portion of the game. Unfortunately, the game ended up being unbalanced in favor of the mafia due to some poor decisions that I made, mainly giving them abilities that allowed them to kill twice at night. In my defense, my attention was divided between the other game I was hosting, but still, there were definitely ways in which the game could have been improved.

The village struggled for most of the game, and they didn't really have enough time to recover from a poor start due to the design of the game. Most notably, a suspicious hammer vote by user MeowMix led many to suspect him, even though he was a village member. What led next was a lot of village in-fighting which the mafia capitalized on. There's not really much else to say, due to the relative shortness of the game. The mafia did their job by laying low and throwing suspicion on to others, which led to their eventual victory.

The best players were the mafia (Blazade, rssp1, shubaka17, Twin), who did exactly what they needed to do to win the game. Even if games are unbalanced, it doesn't mean that they are automatically won. The side with the advantage still needs to follow through to achieve victory. The mafia did exactly that.

a nice basic game of actual mafia is exactly what it sounds like: I wanted to make a game much closer to traditional mafia than what is normally run in Circus. The result was a No Outside Contact (henceforth NOC) game with minimal power roles, though what few roles there were had an element of complexity to them. The game pitted a village against a team of various baddies attempting to subvert from the inside: a werewolf, an arsonist, a saboteur, and a mastermind. The village, unusually, had two cops and two bodyguards; however, each would only succeed against specific members of the mafia, preventing them from having too great an impact on the game and keeping the focus on scumhunting.

Unfortunately, Smogon NOC games tend to be one-sided affairs, usually in the Mafia's favor. This game was no different, as Da Letter El, Haruno (later Josh), tropiusisbae, and Aubisio ran circles around the hapless villagers. After two mislynches (led by a combination of DLE's commanding presence and some good old-fashioned village confusion), the village did manage to get their act together for a bit, lynching tropius and Aubisio on consecutive days; however, they were then slain by the #1 destroyer of NOC villages: inactivity. The general apathy of the villagers later in the game made it quite easy for the remaining mafia members to skate by just enough to claim the victory.

Neighborhood was a game where the players were split into groups of three that could communicate. Da Letter El and I balanced it so the hoods had random people as opposed to fixed roles. Mafia won that game against all odds, because there was a cult group run by a vampire also contesting them.

Paranoid Mafia's defining concept, outside of no outside contact, was that the game of mafia doesn't end when the mafia are all lynched, as is typical of mafia games. Instead, players had to vote to end the game once they believed all the mafia had been eliminated. Failure to do so by a certain point would end in a loss for the town. As it played out, this sort of paranoia never really came to fruition, as the village never managed to even find one mafia to feel comfortable even attempting to end the game. The game possessed two mafians with two total kills, requiring seven mislynches in order to win. Twin and Flyhn/Asek, the mafia team, were both under moderate suspicion for most of the game, but never quite enough, as they pulled off a perfect game. Paranoid Mafia will be remembered as the mafia game with the most posts in Circus Maximus history and yet another Smogon Mafia NOC victory.

See Acid City's Trouble. This was a shorter run of the same type of game.

This was a game based on the mafia-like browser game, Town of Salem. It seems that it was as hectic and random as would be expected.

Allegedly I cohosted this tournament, but I do not remember doing so at all. Fairly standard game tourney from the looks it. Snake pick was utilized to draft players.

PSW V came about with the advent of Dungeons and Dragons 5e. I believed that its more user friendly, more sensible, and simpler gameplay was more fitting for PSW and very open to modification. Champions were totally redesigned around a RPS system. In addition to their three major powers, each had three attack types. Each attack gave a different bonus but was more or less prone to hit based on whether their opponent beat their attack type in the same round. Summoners were also retooled to be completely original creations of each player.

This game was closer to my original vision than ever before. Not only did each class stand out, but most champions were absolute paragons and nightmares. Most were in their own way almost unbeatable. Yet the three weakest champs made it to the final three. I wish I could have run this game better. PSW I and II were done when I was a starving artist, but V took twice as long. Maybe almost a year isn't a big deal for this type of game, but it contributed to fights getting rushed. This was definitely more of a battling game than a strategic one. The summoner change really didn't work out, giving much less strategic depth to each player.

Best fight was when Ullar's Simo Hayha killed Flyhn's Lernean Hydra, shooting it with a sniper rifle from a top a church steeple and barely winning. Also worth mentioning is when Ullar and Former Hope's Perseus teamed up against Agape's Väinämöinen. Agape had just blown up a college and was theoretically much more powerful than his opponent, but he was taken down. jumpluff played the best with incredibly detailed plans, far and beyond any other player, but LightWolf stole the game with his predictions in the final fight.

The Genius Forum Game was based off of the South Korean variety show of the same name. The game requires figuring out the individual games of each round while also figuring out the people you are playing against and with. I ported the overarching structure of the Main Matches, Death Matches, and Garnets from the show but created the individual Main and Death Matches on my own (although some were based on games seen on the show).

Early on, it seemed as if LightWolf and UncleSam were fighting over control of the game, notably with LightWolf devising a strategy to send UncleSam to the Death Match in round 3. However, UncleSam survived, and in round 4, made a deal with Da Letter El for a Token of Life, which ended up sending LightWolf to the Death Match in round 4, where he would be eliminated. From there, UncleSam and his alliances gradually took control of the game. In round 7, UncleSam, Da Letter El, Blazade, and idiotfrommars formed a lasting alliance that would take each of them to the final 4. Blazade, who had to survive the first two Death Matches, did not face another until the finals; he would face off against UncleSam, who most people saw as the dominant force throughout most of the game. However, due to UncleSam's heavy-handed approach, Blazade received a 7-4 support advantage in the finals from the eliminated players, leading Blazade to a 2-1 victory in the finals.

It's hard to pick out any interesting plays, because for the most part, the group that was in charge tended to stay in charge, so I'll say the biggest play was the deal UncleSam and Da Letter El made in round 4. Da Letter El had been in Lightwolf's alliance and was pushed toward victory by that alliance, who was targeting UncleSam. However, UncleSam gave Da Letter El a Garnet in exchange for the Token of Life, which would be the start of their path to the Final 4 together.

The idea behind the game was to emulate the actual television show as much as possible. The challenges were tailored around the fact that this is a Pokémon site, but otherwise they followed the same format as the show itself. The game of Survivor itself is a really interesting social experiment between people, and even though the real life aspect was missing in this game, it was still really interesting to see how a wide variety of users (including those who do not usually hang around in Circus) got along with each other and how they dealt with the challenges thrown at them by the game.

The early game went forward without many real surprises from a neutral point of view. The more unknown players from the circus community and weaker battlers were all voted out before the merge (when the two tribes were condensed into one). One notable player that was voted out before the merge was King_, who had an active social game to make up for his weakness in battling. It got him out of a jam on his original tribe, but when the tribes were switched, he was left without any allies, and his team threw the challenge to get rid of him. By the time of the merge, the remaining players were either strong Circus players or good battlers. From there the game really became interesting - the first vote pitted a strong day 1 alliance consisting of rssp1, Blazade, RODAN, and Haruno versus the rest of the game. Twin was a member of this alliance but decided to flip to the other side, drawing Yeti and zorbees with him. But the craziness didn't end there—rssp1's alliance responded by gathering the votes to vote Twin out at the next tribal council. The next two votes were relatively uneventful, with the next major event being RODAN's decision to quit the game. This put zorbees in a difficult predicament, as many saw him as the biggest threat in the game. Ultimately, he was voted out, leaving TraceofLife, billymills, rssp1, and Blazade left. At this point rssp1/Blazade/ToL had a pretty solid alliance, but billy continued to win immunity, leaving him safe. Then, the alliance had to turn on each other. With rssp1 and Blazade having been allied from the start of the game, ToL needed billy's vote to force a tiebreaker. billy initially voted rssp1, but in the re-vote he switched his vote to ToL. TraceofLife did a remarkable job getting as far as he did, being a relative unknown and having been targeted by many as a challenge threat from the beginning of the merge.

With three people left, it came down to one final challenge. billy lost his battle to rssp1, and Blazade immediately conceded his battle, leaving rssp1 with immunity and a chance to argue to the Jury (those who had been voted out starting at the final 10). rssp1 picked Blazade to join him, voting billy out and leaving him as the last member of the Jury. In the final part of the game, both rssp1 and Blazade argued their case as to why they deserved to be the sole Survivor. In the end, Blazade was seen as more of a follower, and the Jury credited both rssp1's battling prowess and his gameplay in managing to get to the end. With the aid of a little luck and a lot of skill, the jury deemed rssp1 worthy of the title of Sole Survivor, winning in a 6-1 vote over Blazade.

This was a short form puzzle game where every player had one kill and could use them in real time. Two games were played.

Witty is an online game where players anonymously submit clever responses to things and everyone votes for the funniest one. In the forum version, players submitted stories to writing prompts.

See Forum Witty.