[andrewzah]

I'm not really sure why they chose Among Us as an alternative to poker. Sure, it has a little chance and unknown information, but among us is really more of a social study to see how easily people can be swayed into voting people off.

In my experience if I talk confidently and get the first word in it's pretty easy to cast aside suspicion. In fact, one meta strategy is to kill someone, then report the body yourself and immediately accuse someone else. I've done this when someone witnessed me killing someone, and I actually got -them- voted off. It's all good and fun but I did feel rather scummy for a bit after. :)

Another strategy is to follow someone for a bit in the beginning, such that if you were the imposter you could've killed them, leading them to trust you. Then in voting sessions that person will likely vouch for you.

[StavrosK]

The self-reporting strategy is easily countered by first voting off the person you're accusing, and then immediately you if that person turns out to be a crew member.

[thedirt0115]

There is a rule variation that disables confirmation of whether the person you're voting off was a crewmate or imposter --- this variation makes the "kill, self-report, blame other person" strategy viable. It's a simple change, but it really spices things up!

[andrewzah]

That is the risk of self-reporting, although some people easily forget...

[LolWolf]

> In my experience if I talk confidently and get the first word in it's pretty easy to cast aside suspicion.

Do you usually play with friends? This is definitely not a stable strategy in the repeated Among Us game with the same players :) (although it is quite effective to start! Assuming nobody else is also using it.)

> Another strategy is to follow someone for a bit in the beginning, such that if you were the imposter you could've killed them, leading them to trust you. Then in voting sessions that person will likely vouch for you.

This is called being a “third impostor” (whenever there are two impostors in the round [0]) and it appears to be a little bit more stable, but then casts suspicion on you once you start leaving between kills, among other things. So it’s not fully stable, but some amount of randomness in your playing can also make this strategy viable. (I.e., doing the same when you’re both an impostor and a crew mate with nonzero probability.)

I almost always play the variant where we cannot know whether the person voted out was an impostor or not, so read the above with that in mind. The other variation (where voted players have their type revealed) one also has interesting meta-game strategies like “vouching,” where a player will say “if you vote red and they aren’t the Impostor, then immediately vote me.” This strategy is only exploitable as an impostor when they are close to a win, which makes it a very strong signal of truthfulness in the early game [1].

-----

[0] And is usually just called (n+1)th impostor whenever there are n impostors in a round.

[1] Impostors can exploit this in the late game, if the cooldown for emergency meetings is long-ish. For example: whenever an impostor pair is three kills away from a win, an impostor can kill (leaving two people for a win), self-report, and then vouch. Then the pair can just do a double kill and win immediately after the end of voting + cooldown.

[aequitas]

There are several 'visual' tasks (medical scan, taking out trash, shields, shooting astroids) that allow's one to prove they are a ligitimate crewmember. Casting doubt on you as a 'self reporter'. Also things like the security camara's add even more dimensions to the game.

[csours]

There are so many things that can be configured (eg visual tasks can be turned off because they make the game trivially easy for a group that plays together often), it's interesting watching people adapt the game to their group and play level/maturity in the game.

The game is so simple, and the meta-game is pretty simple too, but the meta-meta-game changes every round as people die and are voted off. It really hurt my brain quite a bit until I figured out that I was watching a meta-meta-game; and it still does hurt my brain a bit.

[shadowgovt]

A high-risk, high-reward play I've seen is to kill someone, report the body, and claim you were on security camera and saw someone else do it. You can be caught out if it doesn't make sense for you to have been watching the cams, but while people keep a mental inventory of "who I saw doing what tasks," it often doesn't extend to the security room.

[aequitas]

Imho, if you where a teammate and not a imposter, you should be voted out regardless if you're just lurking in security and not doing your tasks, so we can finish the game. But then there might be little incentive for you to do your tasks as ghost anyways. Or you can withhold doing tasks as ghost on purpose just to spite the crewmates that voted you out. Like I said this game has many dimensions, wheel within wheels.

[shadowgovt]

The rule I've learned from Mr. Fruit videos is do the tasks first, then you have all the time in the world for monitors.

[foota]

Really only works for one round though, since you'll be Emergency voted out if imposter reveals are on.

[aequitas]

Depends, I've had a game where I was not the imposter but had 3 crewmates voted out on reports I made, yet I was not voted out myself. I would have been really suspicious of someone by that point myself.