White Flag Gambit

The White Flag Gambit is one performed by Mafia players in situations where they cannot bus at any cost; or equivalently, in games where the Town is primarily looking to identify living scum through their connections with the other living players. Without loss of generality, assume there are only two scum participating.

In these situations, one of the scum performing this gambit will attempt to bus their scumpartner anyway, allowing the Townies a chance to hammer for an assured win. In practice, the Town will not take this opportunity, but rationalize that the scum would not do something so rash as to open the door for some idiot Townie to hammer. As a result, the busser and the bussee are no longer considered a viable pair at all when the Town tries to concoct theories about who is in the scumteam. Thus, the scum can only lose if they are caught via incorrect association with a Townie, and get lynched over the Townie they are connected to. The chance of this happening is fairly low.

The gambit namer is the Open Setup White Flag, where the game ends if either of the last two scum die. This has also been seen in games like Polygamist and virtually any C9-style setup where it is very much to the scum's advantage not to prolong the game by bussing.

For an example of this gambit, look at Open 544. On Day 2, Titus opens against her scumbuddy strongly, encouraging the town to hammer. The scumteam and the rest of the game knows that it would be near impossible for the scum to win if the rolecop was lynched that day due to how the setup functioned. The town hesitates and then Titus dismantles the wagon.