A Tip From Alisae

Original post by Alisae on 26 September 2021 PST

Edited and transcribed by Cook on 29 September 2021 PST

Remove Yourself from the Game

Just sitting back and letting things play out is the best course of strategy when it comes to reading players as well as the gamestate. If you can identify what you think scum are going to want to actually do, then your job is easy. Look for the players and their actions during the course of the current day phase and just try to think if their actions align with what scum actually want to do during the day phase.

Crossing The Finish Line

It's hard to do, but to win as scum, you have to cross the finish line. Since scum has to cross the finish line to win, as town we can try to identify how each player would cross the finish line as scum. This gets easier and easier the longer the game gets. Scum players also get lazy as keeping up the charade, so if you approach each day phase with an open mind and throwing everything you know from the previous day phase out the window, you might find notice something you might have not have noticed previously.

Townhunting is Easier than Scumhunting

Progressively throughout the game, townies will naturally be town. Only Town has the desire to be right. If you can identify these moments and identify moments that can only come from town, then it's easy to just get a bunch of townreads and eventually suss out who is scum because you identified who town are.

Fair warning though, once you play against scumplayers like Pooky and LLD, who basically make the game of Mafia seem like nothing makes sense and make it seem like not even robots can perfect this game, you'll realize that this is really arbitrary. You think you know what's going on, but then suddenly you don't.

Luckily for the average player, most scumplayers aren't Pooky or LLD, and seeing a talent like those nowadays that is excited to play the alignment is rare. Most people don't even like the alignment.

As long as you're a villager and you try to chase after the robots, you'll be fine.

At the End of the Day

Villagers want to be right on scum. Scum want to kill villagers.

Reiterating: Remove Yourself.

Let the other players in the game just do their thing. Take a backseat for a couple days, observe as much as possible, and think a game through this lens. You'll find as you get more and more information the longer and longer the mafia game goes on, and as you understand more and more of what is actually happening inside the mafia game, who likes/dislikes who, how many votes you need to kill a player, and as you try to figure out who are the players who want to be right one by one, you'll have good reads.

Have More Trust

If you let players just do their thing, you'll be able to read them better than you would have if you just put them on blast because you don't want to sort any other slots or do something else. If that player is doing something that is actually scum indictive (keep an eye out for tricks), you should be able to do it. Or you realize that the player does just want to be right at the end of the day and that they're a villager.

Who knows.