My Review Of This Game

[Zanteogo]

(since steam is being weird and won't let me post an actual review of this game, I am posting it here, I'm not going to let the 15 minutes it took me to type it out go to waste!)

Town of Salem is pretty much a murder mystery game where people play all the parts. Everyone has their own role and can win by filling their role.

Some roles allow you to get clues about who the killers are. However, you need to communicate this to the other players, the thing is, you don't know who the killers are so you are letting EVERYONE know. Each day the players can vote a player to death, each night players are murdered. The crazy part is, the killers can give false info to throw people off.

There are a crazy number of roles, one will let you talk to dead players, one will let you see who entered who's house at night, one is crazy and WANTS to be voted dead. Plus a ton more. It's pretty cool how they added so many different roles.

Overall, it's a good game.

Now to nitpick some bad points:

The game as a non-killer, though has tools to win, really depends a bunch on the town folk getting lucky and lynching the right people. The clues you can gather are mostly weak. A player can probably figure out one of the 3 or 4 killers, but he still has to convince others that he is right. At the same time you have 3 or 4 killers giving false info and a couple of the "crazy" classes giving random info.

The flip side, if you are part of the mafia (3 of you in a standard game), you get your own chat at night, you get to pick someone to be killed each night, and you know who each other is off the get go. Plus some other randomly picked class powers, including making it so a player can't chat for a day, framing other players and hiding the class of dead players.

From the games I have played, the only reason why the mafia doesn't win in a standard game is because the town gets lucky and happens to lynch the right player or the killers get unlucky and attacks a class that kills them if they happen to attack them at the wrong time.

That's the fault of this game. Too much luck. You can shift things slightly with some skill, but overall it's mostly luck.

What I would suggest is to give some more power to the town classes. The ones that gather info need to get more reliable and exact info, at least some of the time. Even if taken to the other extreme, and say one person knew who all the killers are at the start, they still have to get others to believe them. I don't think it needs to go that far, but it has to be changed or the game will get dull in time. (when you are all just mostly rolling dice and hoping for the best)

You can play some non-standard game, however, when you get into games with mafia, werewolves and vampires mixed in, it becomes a crazy chaotic mess. Some might like this, but it takes the whole "murder mystery" part of the game right out.

Something else that could ruin this game is out of game chatting. The game has a friends list in game and you can start games with your friends playing with you, plus some random strangers. Well.. you can see the problem here. RL friends will tend to talk out of game. Though this is cheating, you know it's going to happen. I'm not sure if there is a "play with random people only" option in game, but if there is not, it needs to be added.

Overall, it's a good game that could be much better. For the low price, give it a try. (or play it for free in the web browser version)

[Honkey Kong]

my review will not post either, says I don't own it yet shows that I have it in my library and notates the number of hours I have played it.....

[Vandalay]

assuming you aren't on all any (chaos mode), your review is decent for starting out, though suggestions aren't very representative of the larger game as a whole. (again I'm mostly basing it off the ranked role lists, as other modes can vary in power of all sides). but yeah quick and dirty of it, the higher the skill level of the game, the higher town's win rate, and the bottom line of it (low skilled town, is about a 70% chance for town, (higher elo games are closer to 85)