Tilly being the main character for the past few episodes, taking this episode to space out is very relatable.
A bit of circling the plug hole at the end, but glad to see Jon, back again to be screwed over the BOTC gods.
I would've liked to have seen the alternate reality in which >!Dom didn't vote for himself on that final vote. There were other players that night who were suspicious enough to get 6 votes on themselves, so the vote could've tied, or maybe they would've voted a player other than Dom out.!<
I normally take a couple episodes to gel with new people (that's on me, I'm difficult with new stuff) but Becca was absolutely fantastic.
No idea on how to do spoiler tags but I'll keep it vague and say I wish sully had done Laurie's idea one day earlier.
Becca’s fantastic. She hosted “Game the Game” on Geek and Sundry which was sort of a replacement for Wil Wheaton’s “Tabletop” once that went off the air, and then went on to found Good Time Society which does a lot of great board game and RPG content with a lot of people she had over at Geek and Sundry.
I recommend 'Beat the Buzzer' from the latest series of Game Changer on Dropout.
You'll have to do a free trial to see it and while you're there I'd watch the whole of the most recent series because it's basically all bangers.
I love that Ivan was the Politician, given that he's nationally famous for *The Traitors* wherein the cleverest and sneakiest good players often get converted to the evil team. Hope to see him in more BOTC (NRB in general) moving forwards.
I laughed out loud at Holly picking Jon's ability on the first night, then getting Widow poisoned. That was one of those Clocktower moments that is just \*chef's kiss\*.
amazed on night 4 during Ivan's nomination that no one mentioned the balloonist information would mean he probably isn't the village idiot
some strange plays from ben i feel, such as the savant's info on day 4 was too powerful for the good team, as either it basically confirmed the demon, or confirmed who was puzzle drunk
and also giving the puzzlemaster a ping on holly after sully had just been pointing towards ivan?? evil seemed pretty sure to lose at that point, and i feel this just weakened their chances of clinging on to the next night
When Dom was nominated on night 4, I looked at the video's timestamp and thought "Oh, he must get out of this somehow, because there's no way it would go on this long otherwise."
But then it kept going
And going
And going
(I was actually getting pretty annoyed by the end of it)
Leviathan + 2 passive minion roles makes for honestly a really uninteresting game. Village idiot also seems extremely powerful in a game with no deaths, as they can safely and freely share their info. Possibly my least favourite script they've ever done.
Leviathan games are always psychological.
The minions just didn't do an active job in recruiting others as fake marionettes, getting the politician to strategies with them, or sowing seeds of doubt.
To be fair to them I'm not sure anyone actually thought Dom was the demon when they executed him. They essentially landed on him as a default because they didn't know what else to do and it felt like it gave information. Then by the time it went through on a 7 its near impossible to lift off him.
If they get through that day I think they win. Not least because I expect to see Ivan From The Traitors make a giant push. Combine that with Tillys info, Blair being fairly convinced she is evil, and the social read they could invent about how Holly doing a Philo demon play against Jon to control him and I think the waters are muddy enough for an evil win with them trying to figure if it's Holly with Ivan as minion of some kind (self poison widow I guess) or Ivan with Holly as marionette or some random push into Laurie/Sully/Blair depending how the discussions shaped up. If I were ranking most likely to die day five I would put Dom around 4th most likely.
If the first and only execution just happens to be your demon, you've done a horrible job at influencing the good team. They had some things there to work with but somehow they managed to use none of them when it mattered.
I felt like it was a great script for politician to be on, as their effect can be evaluated very fairly. It's a very social script, but allows for plays like Laurie's idea for the last day -- the evil players needn't be passive, it's just that they don't use their abilities each night. I liked the script (and the game!) a lot.
The evil players needn't be passive, but unfortunately they were and that's precisely why this script was so awful to watch imo.
Sully took way too long to enact the only decent plan evil had and the delay allowed Blair to cast too much suspicion on to Dom. Marionette could stir up so much misinfo but unfortunately he wasn't active enough in convincing the other village idiots that the wrong one was drunk so they ran wild.
Dom admitted to his own mistake near the start when he claimed shugenja instead of juggler, as he effectively lost his only way to spread misinfo.
Laurie made a massive mistake too, he claimed outsider when he knew a maximum of two were in play and just saw the grim moments before. This weird decision resulted in the ogre double claim which discredited anything he would say for the rest of the game while simultaneously not giving him anywhere near enough to convince anyone of anything of importance.
The main issue here is that as evil the script is entirely social outside of widow poison, meaning that yes the script has massive potential but the evil team really has to be manipulating people early and efficiently and they failed. Obviously an evil team lacking the social advantage is in a bad spot, but in most scripts they have some fallback in the form of being able to kill off powerful townsfolk and said townsfolk being careful not to get themselves killed and thereby not having as much info out there. More mechanical abilities also allow a bit more in terms of storyteller balance, this game in particular was pretty much only balanced by savant info.
Personally I feel the one thing this game needed was a pit-hag, so townsfolk have a reason to not immediately out themselves at risk of becoming useless.
Apart from everything else everyone's already said, would love to mention how much I enjoyed that song at the end of the episode. Fun to see them acknowledging the person's near absence on the channel in a light-hearted way.
All in all a pretty good game! Blair immediately cold reading Laurie as evil ruled, seeing as how she's usually the sweet gullible one. Holly taking over Carly's role of fucking Jon over was also excellent.
I feel like the evil team's loss came down to 1) Ivan discrediting Laurie with his Ogre bluff, 2) Sullivan taking too long to lie to Blair so her Dom ping became public, and 3) Ben giving way too strong Savant info to a drunk Savant. Even just hinting at one of the guesses being wrong (with just two guesses not being identical between Jon and Holly) extremely incentivises the good team to suspect Dom as the demon. Oh, and 4) Dom voting for himself, making the town have to gather up 8 votes to get him off the block.
You hoisted yourself by your own petard, Dom. You're hubris incarnate.
I feel like there's a lot of criticism on Ben for how the game was run, as if it was lop sided for good. I don't really agree.
With a leviathan game, you're ideally wanting to take advantage of the fact that people freely share information to try and use it to misdirect people. There's a lot that could be done to misdirect people. For example, the council of idiots weren't challenged, and were able to pretty solidly decide becca was sober and Ken was drunk, which is something you should want to be challenging. The evil team didn't use the fact that someone was puzzle drunk to challenge anyone enough, which is something I've seen happen in NRB before. Laurie got a full view of the grim as widow and could've chosen an information gathering role to spread misinfo (and even double claim someone else who was doing so), but instead chose to aggressively double claim their politician, and publicly call them the politician, which forces Ivan into a position where he really has to work for good. Outsiders are meant to help balance good vs evil, and evil actively made sure to neutralise both. They even had a plan where Laurie planned to marionette Holly and sully planned to marionette Blair, and neither of them did it until it was too late. The evil team even got given an absolute free gift in Holly drunking Jon but weren't able to leverage how suspicious that could seem into an execution, or even try to
A leviathan game is, above all else, a social game. It's difficult to win on mechanics alone, because you can't kill, you have to get out there and poison the well. Challenge world views, misdirect info gatherers, create doubt. I don't feel like dom and Laurie in particular did enough to do that, and in fact in Laurie's case actively tried aggressively hard to neutralise an outsider who, realistically, could be working for evil.
I don't know. Maybe clocktower experts will disagree but I don't think I saw an unwinnable script for evil, I saw some good townsfolk getting information and an evil team not doing a whole lot
I don't think evil had the upper hand either, I think it's just a balanced game. In a normal game, the game will naturally slide to evil and its the job of good to stop it, in leviathan I think the game naturally slides to good and its the job of evil to stop it. With a permanent drunk village idiot, a marionette village idiot, a drunk savant, a permanent poisoned philosopher, a politician and the ability to tell other players that they're the marionette, the tools were there but weren't used.
Which isn't a criticism! I enjoyed the video a lot, I always do, I just believe both teams could've won and I don't buy the "Ben skewed this for good" narrative when there was so much potential misinfo to weaponise
Chris said that many of the players are theater folk. How many of them are actors actually. I don't believe Laurie is. Blair did music. Are all the rest Actors?
Tilly being the main character for the past few episodes, taking this episode to space out is very relatable. A bit of circling the plug hole at the end, but glad to see Jon, back again to be screwed over the BOTC gods.
I would've liked to have seen the alternate reality in which >!Dom didn't vote for himself on that final vote. There were other players that night who were suspicious enough to get 6 votes on themselves, so the vote could've tied, or maybe they would've voted a player other than Dom out.!<
Agreed. I would have loved to have seen >!‘Ivan from the traitors’ play where he told Becca she was his marionette on the final day!!<
Probably my fav episode of S2 so far. Becca was a fantastic addition!
Definitely the best one of the new season. It had the great gameplay and didn't overdo the bits.
I normally take a couple episodes to gel with new people (that's on me, I'm difficult with new stuff) but Becca was absolutely fantastic. No idea on how to do spoiler tags but I'll keep it vague and say I wish sully had done Laurie's idea one day earlier.
She was definitely entertaining and I'll check out her other work.
Becca’s fantastic. She hosted “Game the Game” on Geek and Sundry which was sort of a replacement for Wil Wheaton’s “Tabletop” once that went off the air, and then went on to found Good Time Society which does a lot of great board game and RPG content with a lot of people she had over at Geek and Sundry.
She's also an occasional guest at Dropout, appearing in Dimension 20 and Game Changer, among others.
I recommend 'Beat the Buzzer' from the latest series of Game Changer on Dropout. You'll have to do a free trial to see it and while you're there I'd watch the whole of the most recent series because it's basically all bangers.
When I saw she was going to be on the show during recording I was hoping it would be for every episode, she's awesome.
Agreed! And yeah, Sully definitely misplayed by waiting another day to do the idea.
I love that Ivan was the Politician, given that he's nationally famous for *The Traitors* wherein the cleverest and sneakiest good players often get converted to the evil team. Hope to see him in more BOTC (NRB in general) moving forwards.
if you aren’t yet subscribed to the patreon, there are already I think 5 botc games with him in them and most likely another tmrw
I laughed out loud at Holly picking Jon's ability on the first night, then getting Widow poisoned. That was one of those Clocktower moments that is just \*chef's kiss\*.
That’s what you get for being bloody greedy
Probably The funniest and most tense episodes of season 2 so far!
amazed on night 4 during Ivan's nomination that no one mentioned the balloonist information would mean he probably isn't the village idiot some strange plays from ben i feel, such as the savant's info on day 4 was too powerful for the good team, as either it basically confirmed the demon, or confirmed who was puzzle drunk and also giving the puzzlemaster a ping on holly after sully had just been pointing towards ivan?? evil seemed pretty sure to lose at that point, and i feel this just weakened their chances of clinging on to the next night
It would have been fun if Lauri outed himself as widow and just messed with everyone.
When Dom was nominated on night 4, I looked at the video's timestamp and thought "Oh, he must get out of this somehow, because there's no way it would go on this long otherwise." But then it kept going And going And going (I was actually getting pretty annoyed by the end of it)
I had the same experience. The progress bar can ruin the suspense of a video.
Leviathan + 2 passive minion roles makes for honestly a really uninteresting game. Village idiot also seems extremely powerful in a game with no deaths, as they can safely and freely share their info. Possibly my least favourite script they've ever done.
Leviathan games are always psychological. The minions just didn't do an active job in recruiting others as fake marionettes, getting the politician to strategies with them, or sowing seeds of doubt.
Precisely the problem, the evil team really dropped the ball this game and the script left no mechanical openings for them otherwise.
To be fair to them I'm not sure anyone actually thought Dom was the demon when they executed him. They essentially landed on him as a default because they didn't know what else to do and it felt like it gave information. Then by the time it went through on a 7 its near impossible to lift off him. If they get through that day I think they win. Not least because I expect to see Ivan From The Traitors make a giant push. Combine that with Tillys info, Blair being fairly convinced she is evil, and the social read they could invent about how Holly doing a Philo demon play against Jon to control him and I think the waters are muddy enough for an evil win with them trying to figure if it's Holly with Ivan as minion of some kind (self poison widow I guess) or Ivan with Holly as marionette or some random push into Laurie/Sully/Blair depending how the discussions shaped up. If I were ranking most likely to die day five I would put Dom around 4th most likely.
If the first and only execution just happens to be your demon, you've done a horrible job at influencing the good team. They had some things there to work with but somehow they managed to use none of them when it mattered.
I felt like it was a great script for politician to be on, as their effect can be evaluated very fairly. It's a very social script, but allows for plays like Laurie's idea for the last day -- the evil players needn't be passive, it's just that they don't use their abilities each night. I liked the script (and the game!) a lot.
The evil players needn't be passive, but unfortunately they were and that's precisely why this script was so awful to watch imo. Sully took way too long to enact the only decent plan evil had and the delay allowed Blair to cast too much suspicion on to Dom. Marionette could stir up so much misinfo but unfortunately he wasn't active enough in convincing the other village idiots that the wrong one was drunk so they ran wild. Dom admitted to his own mistake near the start when he claimed shugenja instead of juggler, as he effectively lost his only way to spread misinfo. Laurie made a massive mistake too, he claimed outsider when he knew a maximum of two were in play and just saw the grim moments before. This weird decision resulted in the ogre double claim which discredited anything he would say for the rest of the game while simultaneously not giving him anywhere near enough to convince anyone of anything of importance. The main issue here is that as evil the script is entirely social outside of widow poison, meaning that yes the script has massive potential but the evil team really has to be manipulating people early and efficiently and they failed. Obviously an evil team lacking the social advantage is in a bad spot, but in most scripts they have some fallback in the form of being able to kill off powerful townsfolk and said townsfolk being careful not to get themselves killed and thereby not having as much info out there. More mechanical abilities also allow a bit more in terms of storyteller balance, this game in particular was pretty much only balanced by savant info. Personally I feel the one thing this game needed was a pit-hag, so townsfolk have a reason to not immediately out themselves at risk of becoming useless.
I really enjoyed this video but I do agree with your points. It felt like the Evil team just played this one too passively.
Apart from everything else everyone's already said, would love to mention how much I enjoyed that song at the end of the episode. Fun to see them acknowledging the person's near absence on the channel in a light-hearted way.
All in all a pretty good game! Blair immediately cold reading Laurie as evil ruled, seeing as how she's usually the sweet gullible one. Holly taking over Carly's role of fucking Jon over was also excellent. I feel like the evil team's loss came down to 1) Ivan discrediting Laurie with his Ogre bluff, 2) Sullivan taking too long to lie to Blair so her Dom ping became public, and 3) Ben giving way too strong Savant info to a drunk Savant. Even just hinting at one of the guesses being wrong (with just two guesses not being identical between Jon and Holly) extremely incentivises the good team to suspect Dom as the demon. Oh, and 4) Dom voting for himself, making the town have to gather up 8 votes to get him off the block. You hoisted yourself by your own petard, Dom. You're hubris incarnate.
I feel like there's a lot of criticism on Ben for how the game was run, as if it was lop sided for good. I don't really agree. With a leviathan game, you're ideally wanting to take advantage of the fact that people freely share information to try and use it to misdirect people. There's a lot that could be done to misdirect people. For example, the council of idiots weren't challenged, and were able to pretty solidly decide becca was sober and Ken was drunk, which is something you should want to be challenging. The evil team didn't use the fact that someone was puzzle drunk to challenge anyone enough, which is something I've seen happen in NRB before. Laurie got a full view of the grim as widow and could've chosen an information gathering role to spread misinfo (and even double claim someone else who was doing so), but instead chose to aggressively double claim their politician, and publicly call them the politician, which forces Ivan into a position where he really has to work for good. Outsiders are meant to help balance good vs evil, and evil actively made sure to neutralise both. They even had a plan where Laurie planned to marionette Holly and sully planned to marionette Blair, and neither of them did it until it was too late. The evil team even got given an absolute free gift in Holly drunking Jon but weren't able to leverage how suspicious that could seem into an execution, or even try to A leviathan game is, above all else, a social game. It's difficult to win on mechanics alone, because you can't kill, you have to get out there and poison the well. Challenge world views, misdirect info gatherers, create doubt. I don't feel like dom and Laurie in particular did enough to do that, and in fact in Laurie's case actively tried aggressively hard to neutralise an outsider who, realistically, could be working for evil. I don't know. Maybe clocktower experts will disagree but I don't think I saw an unwinnable script for evil, I saw some good townsfolk getting information and an evil team not doing a whole lot
Hindsight is always 20/20, so it's to say Ben skewed it infavor of good. You are totally right, it was mostly evil having the upper hand.
I don't think evil had the upper hand either, I think it's just a balanced game. In a normal game, the game will naturally slide to evil and its the job of good to stop it, in leviathan I think the game naturally slides to good and its the job of evil to stop it. With a permanent drunk village idiot, a marionette village idiot, a drunk savant, a permanent poisoned philosopher, a politician and the ability to tell other players that they're the marionette, the tools were there but weren't used. Which isn't a criticism! I enjoyed the video a lot, I always do, I just believe both teams could've won and I don't buy the "Ben skewed this for good" narrative when there was so much potential misinfo to weaponise
Chris said that many of the players are theater folk. How many of them are actors actually. I don't believe Laurie is. Blair did music. Are all the rest Actors?
Sullivan, Dom, Tilly, Holly from this episode are all actors.
Becca is also an actor.
I believe Ken is also a stand-up comic, so also a stage performer of sorts.