General Strategies
September 5, 2022
Following are strategies that I think are frequently applicable. I imagine some, if not all, of these are fairly obvious. That said, I see these sufficiently underused to the point where I figure they’re worth pointing out before diving into more arcane ideas.
Getting on teams is +EV, regardless of your role. Even if you don’t get on teams, you can get information about who is supporting you or detracting from you. When you’re Good, Merlin has an easier time justifying your inclusion: it’s rhetorically easier to add an eager player in than one who is silent and sitting back. The latter looks way more Merliny. When you’re Evil, players who are more reluctant than normal to put you on appear Merliny. Trying to get on teams helps set yourself up to make table deductions.
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Of course, sometimes you don’t want to get on a team. For example, as Merlin when known Evil is proposing, or as clueless good for a team you have bad vibes about. You can use your lack of enthusiasm as a way to spread information. Alternatively, if you want to mask your lack of enthusiasm, you can avoid casting direct aspersions on the team by, say, remarking there’s someone else coming up in the order whose team you might prefer.
NB: this is just about getting people to give you shields. Once you’re proposed on the team, you don’t have to approve it.
Some players have the tendency to avoid associating with Evil teammates. Sometimes they even bandwagon against Evil teammates to appear unsuspicious. This oftentimes hurts Evil more than it helps.
Imagine this common scenario: you’re Evil, and some known Evil gets called out, out of the blue. Then, another voice joins. And another. It appears half of the table is talking this player down. It’s a lot of pressure: you feel like you should join in.
But: who is speaking?
It’s probably a random person, Merlin, and Percival. Perhaps someone vocalized an intuition that Merlin seized on, and that Percival then latched onto. Or perhaps Percival is outing Morgana, with Merlin supporting, and with a random player bandwagoning. Or perhaps Merlin is making a call, with Percival defending, and the two have another player convinced.
In any of these cases, you’re not going to score points with two of the three players who are speaking up. They know, or will soon know, that you’re Evil. Further, if you join the bandwagon now, you won’t get credibility with the players who haven’t spoken up yet: that reward will go to the first speaker or two.
Simultaneously, a lot of this pressure is just in your head. There are still two other non-Evil players at the table who haven’t spoken up! To them, if it’s just two or three people speaking up, well, that could be a deluded good person and a few Evil players, no? Once you join, those bystander players are going to feel more pressure to join — in that way, you’d be issuing the death blow to your teammate. Rather, a good time to join in is after the fourth or fifth person signs on: at that point, your teammate is essentially dead in the water.
So, why not speak up first?
Merlin is always looking for opportunities to bring known Evil down, and they don’t have to support you to tear down your teammate. Remarks like, “huh, this feels like Evil pretend in-fighting,” or, “there’s clearly some animosity here — let’s leave them both off for now” will suddenly leave you both high and dry — all without placing any extra fails on the board. Of course, these observations are very Merliny. At the same time, anyone could provide such insight. Experienced players will have seen plenty of Evil infighting, and will have some sense of when it’s happening.
Beyond not prematurely offering up Evil teammates to Good, it’s sometimes a good idea to associate with Evil teammates, for at least three reasons:
1) Anti-icing. Sometimes Evil will be exposed because “no one is putting them on teams.” Players who are left in the cold tend to look Evil: a Morgana left to hang after Percival has made their call, or an Assassin that Merlin has consciously avoided. If they were truly a good person unluckily left out, you would imagine that Merlin would try to bring them into the fold. You can help your teammates avoid (correctly) being iced by by putting them on your teams or throwing some trust their way.
2) Merlin-hunting. If Evil starts to get table support, particularly from Good (Mordred), Merlin may panic and overplay their hand. Sometimes, the best way to get this ball rolling, is to lend some support — sometimes a whisper, sometimes overt — to your teammates.
3) Appear as a Merlin-Pericval pair. Of these three rationales, I use this the least. But, it’s still an effective play from time to time. By playing to appear as Merlin-Percival, you can try to simultaneously gain table trust and Merlin hunt. Anyone who throws trust your way is going to seem very un-Merliny and un-Percival-like. This is because Merlin already will distrust you, and Percival knows they’re Percival, so anyone fronting as a Merlin-Percival pair is necessarily wrong. Even better: Percival engages with Morgana, thinking Morgana is Merlin, trusting the wrong Percival.
Of course, you can’t do these things every game, and this should be used in moderation. But, supporting Evil teammates is an effective strategy when deployed, and at the very least, you should prefer not to tear down Evil teammates prematurely.
When I don’t know much about the game, I prefer teams composed of players “behind” the Leader. It’s otherwise hard to get information on players behind the Leader in any given round because they won’t have a chance to propose missions. This is important to be able to get some information on each player at the table. Establishing a pattern of play also lets you distribute information by deviating from it — the idea is that each move you make is purposeful. Maybe you didn’t like the person behind you, or maybe you liked the person you gave the shield to. Or maybe you’re just adding some noise out there to give Merlin a chance to put information out.
Rejecting by default provides you more flexibility than approving by default. If you approve by default and suddenly reject a team, doesn’t that just say you’re Merlin? If you reject by default and suddenly approve a team, you have lots of cover.
Giving up is –EV. It’s particularly tempting to give up when called out as Evil. This depends on your resilience for playing from behind and your taste for winning games from behind.
Fighting uphill battles can feel like a lot of unnecessary labor, particularly when you don’t end up getting on a team anyway. But, it can help in a number of ways. Sometimes you do get on the team, or misdirect from your teammates, vitiate just enough trust in a key player, appear as a dirty Merlin, eliminate a Merlin candidate, and so forth. Some players also lend too much respect to other players, and think they’ve been exposed at times where others are still unsure of their role.
That said, continued participation can impact your ability to hunt Merlin. If this is the case, it could be worth sitting back, assuming you still have teammates that aren’t dead in the water. As an etiquette point, I would avoid filibustering, and keep “contributions” moderate.
Incrementalism is an approach which proposes, upon sending players on a successful mission, that the subsequent mission includes all of those players, plus any additional players necessary. When I started, I was staunchly anti-incrementalism. Over the years, I’ve adjusted my stance to more of a pendulum: the more aggressively Evil fails, the better incrementalism is; the more Evil sleeps, the weaker it is.
In general, I still shie away from incrementalism: I assume Evil generally sleep more often than they fail in M1, and that Morgana and Mordred will also frequently sleep in M2. (I’m not saying that this sleeping is preferred: just that it occurs.) In this paradigm, in the event of an eventual fail, it is better to have several teams worth of data, instead of what is essentially one team.
The more confident in incrementalism you are, the faster you should pass the incremental team, to avoid leaking information. The downside is that sleepers have more devastating effect: sleeping comes not only with an eventual fail, but also the destruction of information from prior proposals skipped from early mission passes. So, even if you are taking an incremental strategy, if you’re not confident in it, you should consider seeing a few non-incremental team proposals before voting.
* I say table deductions and not table reads because I don’t think a lot of this is a deep soul read! All you do is observe the reaction, come up with some possibilities for why that might have occurred, and eliminate them as the game goes on. So, deduction :)