Let's Study Games - Final Tribal Council

[Cephrir]

F2 puts a lot of emphasis on the final challenge, which I see as a negative. Possibly I'm biased as challenges are the least interesting aspect of the game to me and I'd rather see a big social or strategic player win. However, they tend to be competitive and often interesting FTCs, and you can get some unexpected winners which is kind of a plus. It feels a little more pure and, like, old school.

F3 is typically nice for the players because more of them get to reach the end which is a positive experience. However, they create the risk of strategic voting. There can now be a situation where a juror should not vote for the player they want to win in order to avoid throwing it to their least preferred option, creating a world where a player who is perceived as having no chance to win in fact has no chance to win, and will get fewer votes than they have truly earned, because jurors don't want to waste their votes. I feel that this is not desirable. That said, having an F3 makes it more likely that a flashy player/exciting winner will be able to make FTC, and so it can reward flashy play which is fun to watch. One other problem with it is that if you have idols expire at 5, this can make it too easy for a player who everyone wants out to make the end with only one timely immunity win. But, you can solve this by changing idol expirations if you want to.

Ultimately I think both are valid & each come with some pros and cons. Like Aronis said, I think the important thing is to just make sure the players know which one it is early on so they can play appropriately. Forcing them to guess adds an amount of luck to the outcome that I'm personally not comfortable with. Also, I'm against just using jury numbers to signal this to the players, because that just punishes new players/anyone who doesn't watch the show who don't know what to look for.

We chose an F3 in KSS in part because there were just so many players that it felt right to allow more to reach the end. I'm not sure we had a better reason than that, tbh.

[Cephrir]

Basically as long as you don't do the F4 fire twist we can be friends.

[Cephrir]

for my next game I'm going to use snake/rat/kitten

[Cephrir]

i think it's more that people object to the idea that it deserves as much focus as the other two

i think i'm in the camp of not telling juries what to base their vote on at all, but i get it