Shamelessness as a strategy (2019)
I’ve enjoyed playing a game called Avalon recently. I won’t go too far into the rules, but it’s a hidden role game in the vein of Secret Hitler or Werewolf, where one team is “good”, trying to uncover who among them is “evil”, before the evil team wins. One of the characters you can play is Merlin. Merlin knows who the evil players are, but can’t reveal what he knows, because the evil team can kill Merlin and win the game. So Merlin relies on another character, Percival, to be his decoy. Percival’s only power is that he knows who Merlin is. So he secretly watches Merlin’s actions throughout the game and amplifies those signals to the rest of the group. The typical strategy is for Percival to attract attention away from Merlin and towards himself. But another, riskier…
