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Two Rooms and a Boom - interest poll

qenya

formerly kokorico
Pronoun
she/her
cJ8d4Cs.png
Since I seem to have a lot of time on my hands all of a sudden, I figured I'd put together a proposal for a game of Two Rooms and a Boom, as was floated in the Game Queue Something! Let me know below if you'd be interested, or have preferences surrounding lengths/start times.

~ * ~ * ~

Two Rooms and a Boom (2R1B) is a social deduction game very similar to Mafia. Instead of an informed minority Mafia playing against an uninformed majority Town, there are two equally sized, uninformed teams, the Red Team and the Blue Team.

Every player is randomly assigned to one of two rooms at the start of the game (simulated on the forums as private threads). Over the course of five rounds, which gradually become shorter as the game progresses, the Leaders of each of the two rooms pick a number of hostages to swap with the other room.

As in Mafia, some players are secretly assigned special roles in addition to their colours. The two most important roles are the President (aligned with the Blue Team) and the Bomber (aligned with the Red Team). At the end of the game, the Bomber explodes, killing themself and everyone else in the same room. If the Bomber catches the President in the blast, the Red Team wins. If the President survives, the Blue Team wins.
Unlike in Mafia, private communication is allowed at any time with any other player or player(s) - provided that they are in the same room as you. However, you must post in your room's thread to say that you are opening a private thread, and who will be added. This is meant to simulate the real-life ability to see other players whispering to each other. Also include the GM in any game-related conversations you open.

You are permitted to reveal your colour or your role name at any time, to anyone, in public or in private. However, you must not lie about your colour or role; you must not reveal your role without also revealing your colour; and if you promise to reveal your colour or role (i.e. as part of an agreement to swap colours or roles with another player), you must follow through on your promise.

The first Leader of each room is selected by the first person to submit their nomination in the room's thread. Afterwards, changing the Leader requires a two-thirds majority of players in the room to agree on a replacement. The Leader can also voluntarily abdicate to another player (with the other player's permission). At the end of each round, the Leader unilaterally decides which players will be sent to the other room as hostages.

Here are some roles that might appear in the game, depending on how many players join. (All roles in the game will be publicly listed before the first round starts. Both teams have the same distribution of roles, apart from the President and the Bomber.)
  • President/Bomber
  • Shy Guy/Shy Guy: May not reveal (or agree to reveal) their role or colour to any other player.
  • Coy Boy/Coy Boy: May not reveal (or agree to reveal) their role to any other player.
  • Spy/Spy: Has the opposite colour to their win condition.
  • Agent/Agent: Once per round, can force another player to share their role and colour with you.
  • Enforcer/Enforcer: Once per round, can force two other players to share their role and colour with each other.
  • Gambler: Third party ("Grey Team"). Wins if they correctly identify the winning team after the last round ends but before results are announced.
There are also a wide variety of other roles (both coloured and Grey) which I may include if there are a lot of sign-ups.
After looking at how some previous forum adaptations on other sites have gone, I'm thinking about using these lengths for the rounds, so that there's a constant decrease in the amount of time available but none of the rounds are ridiculously long:

Round 1 - 60 hours
Round 2 - 48 hours
Round 3 - 36 hours
Round 4 - 24 hours
Round 5 - 12 hours

Each round would be separated by a 12-hour "night phase" in which the Leaders submit their hostages (and everyone gets to have a break from paranoidly doubting each other). That would mean the entire game would probably take about 10 days. But it's totally up for negotiation if anyone has better ideas.

Given the shorter length and more relaxed/partyish atmosphere, I'm eyeballing the period around when ACNH Mafia and Tarot Mafia are ending, when the games are starting to slow down and there are a lot of dead people without much to do. Again, though, any time works if there's something else people would prefer!

2R1B needs at least 11 players to be any fun, but in theory there's no maximum (beyond sensible logistics).
 
I'm definitely in
I think we should cap the player maximum to ~100, because it's really chaotic to try to talk to 50 people in a room, even if you do have 60 hours to do it
 
from my experience playing this on MU, I strongly recommend against having unrestricted whispers. they were super OP and just made the game not fun for players who were left out after most of a team in a room knew each other's identities.

when I played irl we just didn't allow whispers at all and I had always just assumed that was the default, but anyway I found it way more fun to try to communicate to my team members subtly that way
 
from my experience playing this on MU, I strongly recommend against having unrestricted whispers. they were super OP and just made the game not fun for players who were left out after most of a team in a room knew each other's identities.

when I played irl we just didn't allow whispers at all and I had always just assumed that was the default, but anyway I found it way more fun to try to communicate to my team members subtly that way
A no-whispers game sounds fun!
there should be private card/color shares though
 
from my experience playing this on MU, I strongly recommend against having unrestricted whispers. they were super OP and just made the game not fun for players who were left out after most of a team in a room knew each other's identities.

when I played irl we just didn't allow whispers at all and I had always just assumed that was the default, but anyway I found it way more fun to try to communicate to my team members subtly that way
A no-whispers game sounds fun!
there should be private card/color shares though
yeah for sure!
 
I'm down for this, contingent on my being dead (or the game completed) in at least one of ACNH or Tarot mafias by the time this starts. (I'd rather not be in three games at once.)
 
from my experience playing this on MU, I strongly recommend against having unrestricted whispers. they were super OP and just made the game not fun for players who were left out after most of a team in a room knew each other's identities.

when I played irl we just didn't allow whispers at all and I had always just assumed that was the default, but anyway I found it way more fun to try to communicate to my team members subtly that way
Hmm, you probably have a point. When I've played IRL it's usually been with 30-40 people, so it's (a) very easy to talk to people without everyone else in the room noticing and (b) not practical to try to identify everybody else. But with fewer people, and the extra time to think/plan that comes with asynchronous forum play, I can see that those assumptions would flip.

How would you run card/colour (role/alignment) reveals? Require people to say in the main room thread "I am revealing my colour to xxxxx", and then send a PM in which they're not allowed to say anything else?

I did see the MU attempt (someone, I think Seshas?, linked it in the Game Queue thread) but I didn't realise there was postgame feedback at the end as well. Will take a look later.
 
How would you run card/colour (role/alignment) reveals? Require people to say in the main room thread "I am revealing my colour to xxxxx", and then send a PM in which they're not allowed to say anything else?

Yeah, that'd probably be best, and CC the host on that PM as well.
 
What with the chaos that Tarot is rapidly devolving into, it's seeming like this might end up happening rather sooner than anticipated, so I figured I'd try to figure out setup details as quickly as possible! :P

I read through the feedback to the MU game and came up with a couple of changes based on that - would appreciate opinions from anyone who played on MU or otherwise has preferences about the setup.
  • Round lengths: It seems like the biggest takeaway from the MU game is that people felt it moved way too slowly, despite round lengths being only 12 hours. This is kinda surprising to me since the gameplay isn't radically different from Mafia, which works fine with 2-3 day rounds online - maybe it was partially an effect of unrestricted whispers letting everyone figure everything out faster? The rulebook suggests, though I've never tried it, giving the Leaders the power to decide when the round ends if you can't agree on an appropriate time limit. Would anyone have a problem with that?
  • Roles: The other major complaint from the MU game is that everyone shared their roles with each other early on, making the outcome somewhat predictable. There is a role specifically designed to discourage this: the Nuclear Tyrant, which is a third-party role that wins if it shares roles with both the President and the Bomber. Like the Alien in Mafia, everyone else loses if the Nuclear Tyrant wins. (It's usually included alongside several other roles to balance its chances of winning a little, which I can elaborate on if there's interest.) This isn't usually recommended for new players because of its complexity, but the mafia meta here has a PR density so high it's gravitationally unstable, so I'm sure y'all would be able to cope. Again - any opinions either way?
This is who I have down at the moment. We need at least 2-3 more people, ideally - ask your friends!

Seshas
Mist1422
Eifie? (unclear if the "yeah for sure" is an /in)
rari_teh
JackPK (pending death in Tarot/ACNH)
Mawile
mewtini (pending death in Tarot/ACNH)
Trebek
Stryke

(@Ysabel: This sound like something you'd be interested in?)
 
given how much we tend to talk i don’t think that 12 hours is going to be too sluggish tbh, especially if whispers are to be forbidden and/or restricted in some way
this is just me guessing, though; i’ve never played this game before tbh
 
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