First off, what I know about the hidden information:

Break-In 1 (Guard): I became Quick+Noisy (and stayed that way all dynasty), and submitted a route of O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, T, O, O, O, with Extra Spots at Q (connected to O) and N (connected to O). There were two breaking strategies available this Break-In: either standing on the Ingresses or standing on the Artifacts would guarantee a Guard success, assuming no Guards deviated from the strategy.

I had been told by qenya that the other Guards’ strategies were “guard the Ingresses; qenya is on C, Clucky is on N”. qenya subsequently told me that this was backwards, and the plan was actually for qenya to be on N and Clucky to be on C (and Clucky confirmed that assignment).

The results of day 1 are inconsistent with what I was told that the Guards’ plans would be, so I’m interested in finding out what sorts of deviations occurred (especially as any route from C to an Artifact and back would have gone through N). I was considering both possible “benign betrayals” (i.e. a player let a co-conspirator in for Infamy whilst blocking the routes to the Artifact, which doesn’t hurt the Guard team) and outright deviations from the plan which I managed to cover myself. (Round 1 wasn’t planned by the Guards as the group; only qenya knew what my intended route submission was, and only approximately.)

Darknight claimed to have been at G and caught JonathanDark, and I have no reason to disbelieve this.

I concluded that it was most likely that either Clucky had deviated from the plan, or that someone was intentionally trying to frame Clucky.

Break-In 2 (Guard): The strategy of “stand on the Ingresses” was no longer reliable (being defeatable by Back Doors, which had now become available), but standing on the Artifacts still worked (because even if a Burglar moved onto their square with a Distraction, they couldn’t pick them up).

I created a Guard strategy of:

ais523: twelve Vs, Quick, Extra Spots at W and X
Darknight: I then eleven Ks, Quick, Extra Spots at I and L
DoomedIdeas: O then eleven Ts

which was designed to cover all the artifacts with three Guards. (Clucky was also a Guard that round, but wasn’t involved in the strategy.)

DoomedIdeas chose to not be visible at T at minute 9, in the hope of hiding information from Observant Burglars (and maybe getting Fame as a result), and let the other Guards in the plan know about the deviation.

Break-In 3 (Burglar): There were two Burglar plans that would each near-guarantee a success this Phase, both involving Quick snipes from A to B at minute 2 using a Distraction, but varying in how they escaped from the hotel afterwards (one plan used a Back Door at A and escaped through it, the other used a Distraction at minute 3 to escape through C).

I was planning with only DoomedIdeas and qenya, who had the Preparation Actions available. I found the Back Door variant of the plan on my own – the other Burglars I contacted about it told me that Clucky had also seen and suggested the same plan, so we both came up with it independently.

This plan was theoretically beatable, incidentally (with one Guard starting E, A(B) then going back to E, and a second non-Quick Guard doing E, A, B×10; that would have allowed the Guards to stand on the Artifacts before they could possibly be stolen, because a Back Door can’t be entered at minute 1, and would have been consistent with leaked routes). I think it may have been possible for the Guards to predict the Back Door + Quick + Distraction snipe and close it off, and the fact that they didn’t had a significant effect on the course of the dynasty.

I offered both DoomedIdeas and qenya the opportunity to do the Artifact snipe, but neither wanted to become Quick, so I volunteered to do it myself (being Quick already). I requested the Back Door option because it would be possible to observe a Burglar deviating from the Back Door action (because it would cause my route of Grounds, A(B), Grounds×10 to be unexpectedly rejected), although I gave DoomedIdeas the final choice (because I needed to trust DoomedIdeas anyway due to being the person doing the minute 2 distraction). I know that the other Burglars were planning to use the minute 2 distraction to farm Infamy, but don’t know what specific routes they used.

Break-In 4 (Guard): I came up with the plan for this round, which was as follows:

- I move the Locked Keycard to P, and DoomedIdeas moves the Mundane Evidence to K
- I guard H and I, using two Extra Spots to cover Q at minute 5 and 8, with the positions mostly randomized otherwise, and can place the other two Extra Spots freely
- JonathanDark guards N most of the time, using an Extra Spot to cover it at minute 1, but guards O at minutes 5 and 8, and places an Extra Spot at M and O at minutes 6 and 7 (randomized which way round), and can place one more Extra Spot freely
- DoomedIdeas guards D and E (starting E, D, D, D, then randomizing, except for being at D at minutes 9 and 11)

Although I don’t know for certain, I don’t believe anyone deviated from this (except that my “randomized” was actually an attempt to second-guess the Guards rather than being truly random). This plan blocked a large number of possible routes, with the Extra Spot placement being very careful to prevent strategies like “enter at N at minute 5, snipe from M at minute 6, wait at M at minute 7, leave at N at minute 8” and various routes through X and Q (one of which I posted as a Rumour). It wasn’t foolproof, though.

I was aware at this time that Extra Spots would apply to every Minute, not just the Minute they were placed at (and also noticed the ability for Guards to use each others’ Extra Spots, but didn’t really think about it much because the Guards mostly weren’t close enough to each other to interact in that way – it could theoretically have mattered at Q but I doubt it actually did). I didn’t tell the other Guards, though, because I was content for them to end up exploiting the loophole accidentally.

The main Artifact I was worried about was the concealed one – I knew it wasn’t at K (because I could move an Artifact there), but both I and L would have caused problems (both squares were Distraction-snipable, and although the other Artifacts couldn’t be Quick-sniped either because they were Disguised or because we moved them, the concealed artifact would be snipable on either square, if the Burglars decided to go for it).

I assume, from the whole Shenanigans thing, that the plan would have failed if not for the Extra Spots bug, but am not sure how.

I was also a bit concerned about the rumours, which mentioned a guard covering N+O and a guard covering H+I, which are fairly close to the actual plan. I don’t know whether they were from a Burglar who guessed (or were leaked) our plans, or whether they were from a Guard who accidentally leaked details of the plans in the process – I think the former option is more likely because the plan wasn’t really covering O in a traditional way. There was a possible timing scam for people to prove that they hadn’t made the Rumors, by making a Rumor in quick succession afterwards (which is why I proposed to make Rumors once-per-Break-In – it kept the ability to prove you hadn’t made a Rumor but removed the timing aspect of things).

Break-In 5 (Burglar): I was playing this one solo (not cooperating with the team) and let them know that I would (because I didn’t initially think they had a reason to coordinate with me – later I realised that one existed, in that they could assume that I would be caught and thus route away from that spot, because their Route was irrelevant if I didn’t get caught, but I think the other Burglars submitted passive routes – if the tracker is correct then Clucky must have submitted Grounds×12 and probably didn’t use Groundwork at all).

My main considerations were routes via X and routes via C, and I chose the route via C (which fortunately turned out to be correct). Based on comments in the DoV, the Guards seem to have assumed that I would enter the hotel only once, but I was actually dodging in and out, to farm Infamy on Minutes where the Guards were unlikely to be there (there was a Guard visible at F in the Guard Noise, meaning that that Guard would need at least two Minutes to reach C, so minutes 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10 would be safe from that Guard in particular – if I had needed more Infamy, e.g. if Camera Traps hadn’t been nerfed, I would have used minutes 4 and 5 due to the risk of a guard covering C en route from E to the middle of the map). My route was C, Grounds×6, C, C, C, Grounds, Grounds (I needed to farm at least 4 Infamy to have 2 left after being caught by a Camera Trap – I was expecting a camp of X, N, G plus a Camera Trap at C, and although that wasn’t exactly what the Guards apparently did, it was close enough for my plan to still work).

I think an interesting topic of discussion for this dynasty is related to proposal strategy. At least one player has claimed that they consider the dynasty to have been entirely luck-based with results being determined primarily by which team a player ends up on, but I disagree.

My basic strategy this dynasty was “look for loopholes, either scams or breaking strategies – if they benefit you, exploit them, if they don’t benefit you, fix them”. Apparently there weren’t enough people doing that on the opposite teams, because for every Break-In except the fifth, there was a breaking strategy that benefited my team (and even the fifth initially had a breaking strategy that benefited me, but that one was spotted and patched because the strategy was “submit any route at all and you win”). On each of the first four rounds, if I had been on the other team, I would have pointed out the relevant breaking strategies in an attempt to get them removed, so would have had a good chance of succeeding even if the dice had rolled differently.

Mid-dynasty, I was having a discussion in PM with another player about whether it’s good strategy to try to bias things to your own side with proposals. My plan was actually a bit subtler – I was trying to bias things to my own side but not too far, because I knew that I might end up on the opposite team and was thinking ahead to future rounds. (For example, during the first couple of rounds, I knew there were breaking pro-Guard strategies; but I also expected to remove them when I became a Burglar, so I wanted the ruleset set up in a way that would favour the Burglars if the breaking strategies for the Guards were removed.) And the way I was trying to bias things was primarily by selectively fixing loopholes – loophole fixes are a very hard sort of proposal to vote against. I think some people may have caught onto the strategy of “be the person who fixes the loopholes” (because it makes it easier to selectively preserve some loopholes as you fix others), and aimed to produce alternative fixes to mine in order to counter it, but that actually didn’t matter this dynasty because the loopholes I wanted to preserve were generally in entirely unrelated rules and unlikely to be accidentally removed by any fix to the loopholes I wanted fixed.

There was a weird pattern this dynasty where some of my proposals were a combination of something I wanted and something I didn’t care about (added either to disguise what I was up to or to make the proposal more likely to pass), and players voted them down and instead voted for a version with the part I didn’t care about removed. Most notable was “Stasis Breaker” – that included a fix for a 100%-Guard-win strategy because I thought the Burglars would be unwilling to start gameplay anyway, but instead it got voted down primarily by Burglars, and reproposed by a Burglar without the fix (and ended up passing, and then we used the 100% strategy to win the round?). I don’t understand what was going on there at all. Incidentally, I was expecting “Clucky, I challenge you!” to be voted down – it was there primarily as a bluff-call – but the actual reasoning the voters gave to vote it down was wrong (placing me and Clucky on opposite teams would actually have maximised the chance of round 5 being meaningful – with us on the same team, it ended up being initially meaningless and required a rules change).

Another weird pattern – once I noticed that Clucky was voting the opposite way from me on every proposal, I simply voted the opposite of my actual viewpoint on proposals that I expected might be close, in order to effectively gain two votes on them via controlling Clucky’s vote as well as my own. (I would have done a last minute CoV, with an admin ready to enact immediately upon the CoV, if it turned out to be the deciding vote – however, the vote tallies never reached a point where I had to do that.)

In general I think the conventional gameplay of this dynasty didn’t actually function (I think every round except possibly the last was affected by either a breaking strategy or a scam – and the last round could have turned into effectively a pure dice roll if the route had been leaked at E rather than F, although fortunately it turned into something more like a battle of wits instead, which was much more enjoyable). I was, however, aware from the start of the dynasty that the conventional gameplay was likely to be nonfunctional, so instead decided that it would either be an exercise in a) pooling agreements that lasted multiple rounds and ignored Team assignments or b) tilting the ruleset in your favour, and I generally find aiming to win solo more fun than pooling, so I went for the latter option (and tried to set up the ruleset to make pooling as useless as possible; the dynasty needed an early victory condition to avoid the fool’s gold problem, but I intentionally aimed to add a victory condition for which pooling was mostly useless, in order to try to produce a sort of game that I would enjoy). As such, the victory condition wasn’t a scam or a ruleset tilt, but rather an “if you aren’t having fun, change the rules” sort of moment (although it may have indirectly helped me win via giving me more motivation to actually play).

sad that the dynasty wound up being essentially 100% luck based. wondering if we could’ve eventually gotten a balanced game if we had enough time to iterate

A well-played game with some skilful moves and good proposal play. I was interested to see how the veil of ignorance random team thing would play out with explicitly named teams with different abilities. The shadow ruleset mechanic was good for drawing a clear veil line on that, although I’m not sure how much was lost and gained by allowing proposals to amend the live ruleset in the Setting Patrols phase, when players knew what the teams were. It probably did help people to focus on outcomes and motives, and the Burglars usually had the option to bloc vote anything down if they wanted to (although less so with an odd number of players).

As Ais notes with Back Doors, the virtual actions did have some mild (and underexploited) loopholes with players being able to sound out unknown gamestate information by repeatedly submitting orders whose validity would depend on it, to see whether each action was accepted or rejected. I’m not sure what the lesson is, from that. Perhaps future dynastic rules should be a bit more hard-nosed about accepting and wasting those kinds of invalid orders, rather than immediately sending them back.

Glad to see that the group decided that perhaps the biggest luck-based mechanic, Sidelining to tiebreak equal Bids, didn’t affect the final round’s outcome. We should remember that even the mildest coin-flip tiebreak mechanic (which we occasionally write as a placeholder, not really expecting it to be used) could end up deciding who wins or loses a dynasty.

How did people find the “open for voting for at least 24 hours” speed of proposals, this being the first full dynasty to use it? It was good to see proposals having more time to be assessed thoughtfully, but we definitely hit some slow patches where obvious (but not urgently CfJable) fixes and popular mechanic ideas took an extra 12 hours to enact - especially combined with Revisions, where each Revision (the Decoy mechanic having four) restarted the clock.

@ais523: This makes a lot of sense and explains some of the weirder voting patterns. An inspired decision to use reverse psychology on Clucky. It is very funny to me that he apparently went around in DMs accusing virtually everyone of pooling with you, when in fact you were working alone.

I was, however, aware from the start of the dynasty that the conventional gameplay was likely to be nonfunctional, so instead decided that it would either be an exercise in a) pooling agreements that lasted multiple rounds and ignored Team assignments or b) tilting the ruleset in your favour

I was very much on the (a) side, although I didn’t have the best of luck in my choice of partners, initially teaming up with SingularByte (who lost interest in the game) before carrying on with our recruit lendunistus (who also lost interest in the game) and eventually ending up working with DoomedIdeas. I think it probably helped that I currently have no interest in running a dynasty myself, so the lack of pooling mechanics didn’t really affect me - I was more interested in “winning” as part of a team than outright on my own account.

To summarise the game from my point of view…

1) In the first break-in, I was indeed the Guard who stepped away from my post to let SingularByte in. ais523 suspected that SingularByte was working with Clucky, and tried to cover Clucky’s Ingress; unfortunately, I made a genuine mistake in relaying the other Guards’ plan to em, causing em to cover my Ingress instead and catching SingularByte anyway. Oops.

There was a minor exploit in the first edition of the ruleset where the introduction of Ingresses did not invalidate previously complete Routes already submitted by Burglars that didn’t start at Ingresses, leading some to submit 12-long routes sitting in place at dead-ends to farm Infamy. I tailored my Route to hit likely locations. Unfortunately, Kevan surreptitiously squeaked in a fix before the Break-In, forcing the Burglars to set new valid routes.

2) The second break-in went pretty much as planned. lendun and I located the Concealed artifact by attempting to create Back Doors at its possible locations and finding the Spot where it was impossible to place one. Unfortunately that position turned out to be a coinflip on whether we could evade Guards, and lendun was caught (although I managed to escape with some Infamy).

3) The third break-in is the one where Doomed, ais523 and I broke in together, using a reasonably obvious breaking strategy that all the Burglars independently spotted. Not much to say here. ais523 and Clucky both expressed mistrust of me on the basis that I might throw to help the other win. I still don’t really understand how that works given all of us were on the same team.

4) This is where the game actually got interesting for me, generating the social-deduction gameplay that Kevan seemed to be going for at the beginning. ais523 came up with a reasonably solid plan and distributed it to the other Guards, JonathanDark and Doomed, who followed it correctly. Doomed leaked the plan to me, and JD to Clucky; but whereas Doomed and I kept it secret, planning to throw to the Guards (on the basis that the two of us were more likely to end up opposing ais523 next round than Clucky, due to side balance), Clucky shared it with all the Burglars and proposed a Burglar plan that would beat it.

The original Rumour about the Guard covering N and O (JD) came from DoomedIdeas. We sought to alert the rest of the game to JD and Clucky’s partnership, without revealing who had blown the whistle; Clucky did not reveal the name of his Guard mole to the Burglars, only which Spots they were covering, so explicitly naming JD would have given away that a Guard was involved in the Rumour.

The second Rumour presumably came from JD, seeking to obfuscate the first one.

The plan relied on Clucky and me both creating Distractions, and obviously I chose not to submit mine (the Shenanigan that the one-off rule was meant to catch), so the Guards won, as planned.

5) Doomed and I calculated a 1 in 7 chance that ais523, Doomed and Clucky would all end up on the same team in this round, leading to the guaranteed ais523 win we saw. Unfortunately, that chance came to pass. All other players formed a group chat to try to maximise the chances of catching ais523 under the adjusted win condition; JD proposed the final plan, which I believe everyone followed honestly.

I have mixed feelings about this dynasty. It’s certainly true, as ais523 said, that the dynastic mechanics never really functioned properly, leading to the win condition feeling somewhat arbitrary, and I was contemplating idling towards the middle of the dynasty. That said, the social-deduction game that grew out of it in the second half was a lot of fun for me. (To be fair, because I placed a lot of focus on gaining Fame and Infamy for myself, I had more opportunities to take decisions than some other people; I can see that it would be less interesting for others.)

On the topic of the 24-hour proposal speed, I appreciated it a great deal. It enabled me to keep the basic mechanics of the ruleset in my head and at least read and understand all submitted proposals before they were resolved, so I wasn’t caught out by the ruleset suddenly changing out from under me, which has led to me bouncing in previous dynasties. I think at this point I would not now consider playing a dynasty with a shorter period; I would probably even be in favour of a still longer one, although I wouldn’t say that’s necessary.

The overall game speed was probably a bit slower than ideal, but I don’t think that was because of the length of the voting period, but rather because there were multiple opportunities for people to bring the dynasty to a complete halt by refusing to submit actions. For example, it took an age for the Guards to submit their plans in the fourth Break-In because the state of the ruleset made it impossible for them to catch Burglars with any plan, so they had no incentive to do so.

“Kevan surreptitiously squeaked in a fix before the Break-In” - I think the Burglars also misread how that fix was working, and thought they could still quickly and cleverly submit dead-end Routes while it was pending. Which was the dynasty’s first halting point: it took a day or two for the Burglars to realise that although I’d accepted and set those dead-end Routes, they weren’t Complete so I couldn’t progress to the Break-In. (The proposal to allow me to point out a stuck game didn’t enact until after they’d worked out what was happening.)

The “you can submit a route using a potential Back Door to see if anyone else has placed a Back Door there” thing was intentional, and turned out to be useful several times this dynasty (in round 3 it protected against a betrayal from qenya, which seems like a useful thing to have protected against even if qenya wasn’t planning to betray in that round in particular; in round 5 I used it to determine that the other Burglars weren’t following the obvious Burglar strategy and thus were probably trying to prevent me winning). It would have been fairly easy to phrase the rule so that it didn’t work (e.g. by having the route be accepted but failing to do anything), but nobody actually did rephrase it like that.

I think that in the fourth Break-In, the Guards should outright have said publicly “the Burglars have a guaranteed win here, so we’re not going to submit until the rules are changed to make it less guaranteed” – that’s what I would have done in that situation.

I agree that the dynasty was slow but don’t think the 24-hour proposal pace was the reason. There were several times when it was waiting on me to submit actions, because I a) wanted the ruleset to be in a reasonable state before I did and b) sometimes had to wait until after everyone else was submitted so that I could sound out potential Back Doors. (Round 5 was a big Timekeeper violation because my plans depended on what the other Burglars did, but they weren’t talking to me, so I had resolved to submit last, and that would have lead to a stuck dynasty if other players also wanted to submit last. Fortunately, everyone else submitted of their own accord, allowing me to sound out Back Doors and then try to play solo.)

In retrospect, Sidelining should have been tiebroken by Sidelining the player with fewest Successes, so that it couldn’t be used to block a victory attempt (having the dynasty come down to a 25% chance of me being Sidelined wouldn’t have been interesting). I gave the other Burglars in round 5 an option to sideline Clucky if they wished (which they couldn’t have taken without my help), but they chose not to take it (which, combined with the lack of Back Door and lack of communication, made me suspicious that they weren’t trying to win the round – if they had been trying to win, I was considering the possibility of intentionally Sidelining myself and hoping that they averaged 2 or more Infamy – and the fact that they weren’t made me consider that they might have chosen not to as a defence against the intentional-Sidelining strategy).

It’s interesting to hear what was happening in round 4! Were the Burglars who weren’t planning to throw the round aware of the Extra Spot bug? I was aware of it while planning the Guard strategy, and came up with a strategy that used lots of Extra Spots in a way that would exploit it effectively, but also had reasons to place those Extra Spots there regardless of the bug, so I think I managed to pull it off without informing the other Guards about the bug. Learning that some of the Burglars had thrown the round intentionally is a bit of a surprise, although it makes sense in retrospect (I remember thinking at the time that despite all the proposals to make things more Guard-sided, the ruleset was still Burglar-sided). The “randomize between” in the round 4 plan was intentionally designed to make the plan more secure against being leaked, because even if it was leaked, none of the Guards would know the precise details of the other Guards’ routes.

The N+O rumour was interesting because I didn’t expect it to be so literally true – I thought that it was trying to spread distrust, but that the author had slipped up by mentioning that there was a guard on N and O in the first place, so took it as evidence that someone was leaking the Guards’ plan to the Burglars. I proposed a timing scam in order to verify that none of the Guards were behind the Rumors, which both JonathanDark and DoomedIdeas messed up (for reasons that should be obvious in retrospect), and I did note the possibility that it might have been intentional (but didn’t expect them to both have been involved in the Rumors!) – one of them managed a timing counterscam to “More timekeeping” by submitting a Rumor more than 24 hours after the original Rumor but while “More timekeeping” was still pending, which would have eliminated any attempt to use “More timekeeping” to verify who sent the original Rumor. I did use the timing scam to prove to the other Guards that the Rumors weren’t by me, in case it was me that they were distrusting (but both JonathanDark and DoomedIdeas knew that JonathanDark had leaked the Guards’ routes to a Burglar, so knew that a Burglar would have access to the information anyway).

I really appreciated the 24 hour proposals! It made the Dynasty a lot easier to keep up with. Things were sometimes a little slow, but I do think that was mostly from the length of our planning stalling the game.

The first Break In:
I became Observant and Slow, and stayed that way for the rest of the game. I attempted to make use of the “no Ingresses needed” loophole, but once that was fixed I submitted a Route of Grounds-X-V-U-U-V-X-Groundsx5.
The second Break In:
I submitted a Route of O-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-O-T-T-T, guarding T but hopefully making Burglars think I was wandering so that they might walk into my Spot.
The third Break In:
I submitted a Distraction at Minute 2, and a Route of Grounds-G-Groundsx10. The Distraction was for the plan of using a Break In at A to grab the Artifact at B in one Minute.
The fourth Break In:
I submitted a Plant Decoy for the mundane evidence, moving it to K. My submitted Route was E-D-D-D-D-E-E-E-D-E-D-D. I also had learned from Qenya that JD and Clucky were working together. I submitted the Rumor of “clucky’s working with whatever guard is on o and n. they’re leaking their spots to let burglars in” in an attempt to make other players less likely to help Clucky in the future, since at the time he and Ais were tied for first.
The fifth Break In:
There was a large group chat discussing how to prevent Ais from winning. The Guards privately came up with a plan, and the Burglers attempted to gain 0 Infamy so that Ais wouldn’t gain any if sidelined. I submitted a Route of Grounds-N-Groundsx10 so as to give Qenya some Fame that could be used if the Dynasty continued.

Something I want to clarify, because it might have been unclear from my comments during the dynasty: I don’t hold any of the pooling that was going on against the players who were participating in it (holding up pooling agreements is more important than cooperating with a team of players who you’ve been randomly paired with).

I was trying to determine who was pooling so that I could plan around it, but that’s a case of “opposing in gameplay” as opposed to “opposing as a person”. (For example, the round 1 results made me suspicious that qenya was pooling with someone; I was considering pooling with her myself, as I like to pool with the newer players, but decided that she already had conflicting obligations. I also considered pooling with DoomedIdeas, but eventually decided to go solo.)

As such, if you form a pool that doesn’t include me, I will (of course) try to prevent the pool from winning the dynasty, but it doesn’t make me less inclined to help you in future dynasties.