A Gustav 30 in 30, #11: Go Directly to Jail

[Gustav 6,469]

 

I promise this image made perfect sense in context.

 

 

The game of Mafia was invented in 1987 by a student at Moscow State University who has definitely never heard of the VHL. That student probably never envisioned Among Us the lengths to which the world would go to study the game, from profitable spin-offs to home-brew versions to even real mathematical research devoted to its analysis. Playing a game like Mafia requires intuition, wit, and lots of knowledge of game mechanics.

 

And running one takes even more.

 

My first exposure to Mafia came much earlier than I thought it was, when @Nykonax floated the idea of a game way back in May of 2019--this would have been S66. He ended up getting a decent-sized player list and making a game happen. At the time, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Not much that was being said in the game thread made much sense to me, and I walked away from the experience considering it largely forgettable. But, I was now aware that this was a thing that could be done on forums.

 

I must have retained that knowledge pretty soon after that, because I remember playing a game in the SBA right around the time of our affiliation fallout. That changed not much of anything about what I knew about the game, but I had retained the basic idea of talking during the day and doing things at night. I'd also joined the EFL (which I will openly admit was fueled by wanting affiliate checks), and in one of those affiliate leagues, I had my first exposure to Town of Salem--a game that you can find on Steam (although I've never played it) that is essentially just a fancy version of Mafia. It turns out that, as a fancy version of Mafia, Town of Salem (or ToS) is readily adapted to a forum game. I still didn't really know what I was talking about in the EFL, but they had a long rule thread and I was more comfortable hanging around there with it being a league that I knew had nothing against me being VHL-first.

 

By this point, it was clear to me that--even though I was clueless--the Mafia concept had managed to stick around for more than just a one-off in our affiliate leagues, and I'd also watched lots of people in those leagues play the games and like them a lot. It was something the VHL was missing, and I was bored--so I figured I should take matters into my own incompetent hands.

 

For those of you who are unfamiliar by this point, Mafia (in general) is a two-sided game consisting of an "informed minority," or an "evil" group of players who plot with each other behind the scenes to kill the others, and an "uninformed majority," or a "good" group who must use their own skills and find out who the bad ones are by talking out in the open (where the bad ones try to blend in and mess with their plans). There are lots of variations on this, many with more unique roles than others. I wasn't confident, so I eventually found myself digging through rule sets on some mafia game forum and settling on a game called Cult in the Jungle Republic where 12 of the 19 people who would end up playing were just residents of the town with no special abilities. We played the game, but most people didn't really like it for that reason--why would you want to play the game where you really couldn't do much aside from following votes? So, it was clear to me that to keep this thing going, we would need to go full Town of Salem--where every single player has a job to do and there are lots of layers to the game beyond just Town and Mafia.

 

Did I establish by this point that I had no clue what I was doing? Whatever. In any case, I relied on two things in equal measure to learn the game, without either of which the game would not be possible. The first was the Town of Salem Wiki, which has every possible role extensively documented with enough information that a game can be run if you read closely enough. The second was @omgitshim, who has every possible role also extensively documented in his head, as well as enough patience that a game can be run even if you're stupid. I spent lots of hours over lots of days dealing with both of those until I felt that I got the point, and then I finally put up the sign-up thread for the VHL's first-ever game of Town of Salem, just over a year after I joined the league and about four months after Cult in the Jungle Republic flopped. Check out the date on that one--is it really a surprise to anyone that we all had the time in our lives to get the game off the ground?

 

ToS #1 was a success, all in all. It took forever--no other game we've played has even started to approach Day 13--but it was a big learning experience for lots of people (myself included) and I had an absolute blast every time I started the night phase and got to see in real time who was taking shots at who. I stuck with asking OMG everything for the most part, but made it through my first game ever without a major crisis. 

 

I knew I'd run lots of games at the start, but I had no idea just how frequently I was doing it and I could never pull that type of thing off today. Within a week, I was signing people up for Game 2, and we'd run up 10 games between the end of March and the end of August--that's one game (which itself took just over a week on average between sign-up and last kill) about every two weeks over that time. I'm honestly shocked that we were able to maintain our player base that constantly, but I suppose that's all we had going on over the summer of 2020. In a way, I wouldn't doubt it if COVID was what gave us the amount of interested people to begin with, or if it was the reason why ToS caught on.

 

Regardless, lots of those interested people deserve my mentions. My handy-dandy stat tracking sheets give me all the info I need to tag those who have been involved the most--obviously OMG, but he and @eaglesfan036 have been considered our nastiest, most competent players from the very start. @Doomsday, @Ricer13, @jhatty8, and @Berocka can also all claim to have played just about every single game we've run (with Eagles, Berocka, and @Devise both running their own spin-off versions of ToS at one point or another). Some others who have stuck around consistently for a long time and are still active in our threads today are @Spartan , @Advantage, @N0HBDY, @rory, @Alex, and even @Ptyrell, who has never had a VHL player but has posted over 1,000 times on our forum for ToS and related games (including his own creative project, Town of Pallet). All of these and much, much more have made Town of Salem what it is, which is an awesome way for the community to really feel like a community. I've had so much fun watching everyone go at each other over the past four years (!) and I'm looking forward to a lot more.

 

To bring it back to being a point in the series about my own personal history, this wasn't the first time I decided to just do something fun for the community rather than waiting for it, but it was the most work I'd ever put into that. I think the league would be a much better place if it had more "just doing" in it, and Town of Salem is something I'll always be able to point to as an example of that. Even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the sim hockey part of the league (and therefore is just one of the "intangibles" on my record), I consider it one of my biggest VHL accomplishments and really feel that it deserves a solid place in this series.

 

 

Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience:

 

#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name

#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?

#3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway?

#4: The House That I Built

#5: Can We Fix It?

#6: American Beauty

#7: The Kids Are Alright

#8: Dogs In A Pile

#9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake

#10: This Old House

[Berocka 2,263]

We do not talk of TOS#1

[Spartan 4,531]

Idk why the picture won't embed but you know which jail picture I'm gonna post

 

Edited May 2 by Spartan

[Spartan 4,531]

[omgitshim 903]

Given this is 30 in 30, I fully expect the 30th day to be announcing the sign-ups for ToS #30 

[Doomsday 4,143]

TALLY HO LADS

[eaglesfan036 4,605]

Love playing with you all. Hats off to everyone, first few games I was able to pretty much sheep everyone like when I told the jailer I was lookout and the entire mafia was guarding him lolz

 

The skill level of everyone has risen so much since then and that plus always being suspicious of eaglesfan always makes the games a fun challenge 

[Ptyrell 415]

 

 

 

Good stuff man. You've brought a lot of entertainment and joy to a lot of people thanks to your efforts in ToS.

[Gustav 6,469]

Gonna Week 2 this one