Mafia's simply not a game where you gaily join hands and saunter off into a happy ending. It's a game based on paranoia, suspicion and deceit. The thrill of deceiving or the satisfaction of bringing deceit to light is what makes Mafia a fun game for most people, but it does tend to make people knock heads whenever they feel the other party is being, to put it nicely, "a little bit disagreeing".
As soon as this game ended, Alice and I laughed with each other for a while about how everything went down. This is just a game folks. We should be able to join hands and saunter into the happy sunset afterward. There is room in this game for vigorous prosecution of suspicions, but such attacks shouldn't be personal or be taken personally.
This game started out bad for scum, but then town imploded on itself with multiple suicides and a complete lack of sanity from any players aside from myself, Alex, and maybe Cid. It also didn't help that I was too busy to really participate during the last two days except for the end of day six.
Near the end I was pretty certain that one of Alex or Alice was scum. Alex scum was not as implausible as the scum seemed to have thought, and Alice's play in the early game was downright terrible. That the three of us were now all on the same wavelength seemed unbelievable in light of the fact that all three of us working together
hadn't caught a scum in days. I was going to push hard for Alice vs Alex on D7, but I made the mistake of thinking we had another day until LyLo. Double vig for scum came completely out of the blue, fuck, I've never even played in a game where scum have single vig.
Kudos to Alice for his play in the last couple of days. He deserves this win for that alone. Alex and I may have played good sane and level-headed townies, but Alice managed to make some of the best town posts in the game
as scum. k4u also did a fine job of staying out of the spotlight without being so lurktastic as to draw attention to herself (i.e. Jam).
On a final note, paranoia and hesitation lead to town downfall. UK's paranoia near the near the end of this game is a great example of how distracting and ultimately useless paranoia generally is. Here's the thing about paranoia - you might be right a small percentage of the time, but by succumbing to it you fail almost every time regardless of the underlying facts due to the devastating effect it has on the social sphere of the game. Hesitation, on the other hand, allows scum to make challenges and still look townie, or results in a waste of special powers.
Anyway, this was fun. I might even play in the next one.
