Mashies Nomination Thread 2020

[CaptainMeme]

Best Mish Mash Newbie
2020-08-17	CaptainMeme	Pine	Survivor: PD	I know Pine isn't technically new, but he's new to LSGs so I think that qualifies! Pine was a great player as Teebo in PvCvW but we didn't see his full potential due to his early boot; thankfully he came back as Jake Peralta in PD and man oh man that was fantastic to watch. He really put his all into the game; not all the moves were great, but all of them were spectacular He has the most spirit I've seen in an LSG newbie in a long time and I hope he plays more!

Best Mish Mash Player
2020-08-17	CaptainMeme	Skelda	Survivor: PD	Skelda has always been amazing in LSGs but I believe he just won two back to back? Poirot was fantastic to watch and he was ridiculously great to talk to ingame. There's a good reason nobody was targeting him for ages and ages despite him clearly being a huge threat! But the main reason for this nomination is the dedication to the gimmick; it was onpoint and fantastic to behold as a Christie fan; I genuinely felt like I was playing with and then watching the real character. That took serious effort and dedication and I can confidently say that people like Skelda going the extra mile with things like this are the main reason I keep coming back to LSGs and why each one feels so unique and great to play.

Best Large Social Game
2020-08-17	CaptainMeme	Haschel Cedricson, CreativeMod1, DeasVail	Survivor: PD	This game goes to show you don't need twists to run a great game; vanilla games can be that too with a dedicated mod team putting their all into crafting an incredible experience for the players. Outside of the challenge design (which was fantastic throughout, especially challenges like the Google Forms Murder Mystery) I'm not sure I can put my finger on what exactly made it so good, but I think it's just the fact you could tell the mods put their all into every aspect of it and the lack of twists and suchlike actually helped the focus be purely on that. Despite not going far in it, I absolutely adored this game.

[CaptainMeme]

Mashtermind
9/25	Ariel	ambic	The Curse of the Rata Mall (Fogies forum)	This was a 12-player post-apocalyptic roleplaying style game with supernatural themes that took place over the course of a month and a half or so. Each player had individual win conditions, some of which were in direct opposition to other players'. The setting was super immersive and detailed, and the game was cleverly designed to have multiple ways to achieve accessing new areas (such as the secret lab and the bank) or completing objectives. One of my favorite moments was when the group came together in the food court to fight a Franken-version of one of the players by creatively taking advantage of the Franken's addiction as well as some dynamite. Both intense and comedic, this game was definitely one of the most thrilling experiences I've had on MafiaScum.
9/25	Ariel	Malkon05	MafiaScum Idol	This is a singing contest with different themed rounds. It's not quite over yet, but it's been super fun to see everyone's talent. Malkon provides in-depth constructive feedback to the participants and also helps foster a really positive environment. The current round's twist where Malkon hand picks song choices to showcase the participants' strengths based on their journey in the contest seems to have worked really well!

ETA: I put (Fogies Forum) to clarify that that's where the sign up thread took place but ambic is obviously correct that the actual game took place in PTs.

Seconding both of these!

MafiaScum Idol was fantastic to watch, what with so many people being willing to put their singing out there. I really think it says something about the mafiascum community (and especially about the way Malkon went about running it) that a format that is traditionally pretty nasty, at least in the early stages, ended up being a beacon of positivity and of building one another up. Would be very happy to see this return - and congrats to Mina on winning it!

I have a feeling Rata Mall is going to fly under the radar because there wasn't a lot of fanfare around it and it didn't go through your typical LSG queue, but it easily matched any LSG in effort put into it, at least from my perspective. It felt almost like a competitive DnD experience! In particular I need to highlight how incredibly well designed this game was, with many diverging ways for every player to complete their objectives in case another player's actions shut off an option, and with every location in the game having plenty to explore and every character having plenty to figure out. The cherry on the top was the level of play and engagement from the majority of the players, making it a very real social game throughout. Thank you Ambic for running it!

[CaptainMeme]

(I'm almost tempted to move the nom for Rata Mall to best LSG but I assume since it didn't go through the queue it's not eligible for that)

[CaptainMeme]

Mashterstroke
2020-10-13	CaptainMeme	Ariel, Talitha, Rubberduck, Porochaz, Primate, Groza529	The Curse of Rata Mall (Phase 10 Threads, Office Part 2 Onwards)	Rata Mall's ending was a thing of beauty. With six players - 3 evil, 2 good, 1 morally grey - remaining, and several players very close to completing their objectives, it suddenly became an absolute bloodbath as the villains raced to kill everyone before anyone could escape the Mall. The endgame really had it all - A secret alliance between villains who knew they eventually needed to kill one another in order to win, a fantastic bluff that kept a hero who had the ability to kill a villain from firing long enough for the hero to be attacked and killed by said ally, one of the villains then immediately attempting to get the jump on the other and failing, being killed in retaliation, and finally culminating in a grand showdown between the single remaining villain and the morally grey character, the latter of which both managed to win the fight and just about managed to complete their good-aligned objectives in time to share the win with the one remaining good player. Oh, and did I mention that that one remaining good player, who had completed their final objective and just needed to survive to the end of the phase to escape, had been hiding in the same room as all the fights had happened , watching all of this go down and knowing that they didn't have the weapons to compete with the villains? If they had been found - and the villains did search - they would have been easily killed. For reference, 5 players died in that single phase (although one was unrelated to this whole showdown). In the entire game prior to that point, 5 players had been killed in total, and never more than two in a phase. It was an epic finale to end a truly epic game.