Mneme's Guide to Vote Analysis

Especially, but by no means always, mafia games (especially, but by no means solely newbie games -- because they are more tractable), mafia games can be won by vote analysis, especially in the endgame.

Scum rarely vote for one another, are reluctant to lynch one another, and in the end, aren't interested in finding out who their enemies are (they already know!), but in getting the day over, lynching -someone-, not being lynched or letting their buddies get lynched, and getting on to the part of the game where they're dominant without revealing too much info.

Analysis of the chat record is pretty straightforward -- you look at what people have said, and try to figure out who seems scummy. The thing here is that it's pretty slippery -- scum will sometimes stage mock-fights in public, and even when they don't, competent scum can frequently do a good job of "playing town".

But the voting record is the strongest and most solid tool the town can use to find scum. Scum who will blithely accuse or FOS one another are often more hesitant to vote for one another -- because any vote could end up leading to a lynch. But there's a caveat here. In order for the voting record to have teeth, it has to be genuine -- any vote has to have the potential to lead to a lynch -- otherwise, there's no penalty for (or clue about) scum muddying the voting record by voting for one another. So part of playing town is to make your votes be (or at least seem) genuine -- both because it makes it easier to analyze your votes and determine that you're probably not scum with anyone else (this doesn't make it easier to find serial killers, however), and to hilight scum, who cannot afford to entirely play this way -- if they vote just as genuinely for their scumbuddies as for everyone else, they dramatically reduce their chance of winning the game.

Analysis is similar -- look at who's voted for who, and try to judge how genuine their vote seemed. If you think there are two mafia left, and someone's voted genuinely for everyone in the game (and/or voted for someone proven to be mafia), then they're probably not mafia. Of course, cunning mafia will try to vote their buddies but then let another bandwagon "win" -- so you need to look for late jumps onto bandwagons (to make sure to be on buddies' bandwagons when they're likely to be lynched or after they make an obvious mistake) and early/late jumps -off- bandwagons (as scum might be willing to vote each other early -- but are likely to look for another target before their vote turns into a bandwagon if they can).