Translation Trios

Main Match 2: ???

Pre-game Rules:

The rules of this game will be released after players have assembled into teams.

Before the game can begin, you must select a table to sit at. There are 4 triangle shaped tables in the room with 3 chairs each, and they are lettered [A,B,C,D]. You will make a submission containing one of the 4 tables that you would like to attempt to sit at. The 3 players who are sitting at each table will form a team of 3.

If more than 3 players attempt to sit at the same table, then players will be randomly selected from that table to be sent to a random table that has 2 or fewer players attempting to sit at it. This will repeat until all 4 tables have exactly 3 players sitting, and thus the teams will be formed.

Main Match 2: Translation Trios

Summary:

Players will have no communication within their own team during this game, except through submissions. Every player in each team will craft messages to be encoded and decoded by their team members. Points are earned whenever a message is decoded to its original form. The team that can accumulate the most points by communicating the best within this limited communication battle will come out on top!

Limited Communication Rules:

Each player will have access to one of the ABC chats, #alpha, #bravo, or #charlie, where they can convene with the members of other teams with the same channel as themselves, but they strictly can not communicate with any other players besides those ones. The players in this channel with you are not on your team. Thus, you will only be able to talk to 3 other players who are not on your team for the duration of the match.

You strictly are not allowed to speak in a channel that contains any player besides these 3 players. It is forbidden to message in #player-lounge, #general, pair chats, and alliance chats that contain players who you are limited from communicating with. #off-topic and other off topic channels that contain all 12 players are acceptable, as long as all communication there is strictly unrelated to the game and is not used to gain any advantage in the game. Any communication in those channels that refers to the game or its rules at all will be considered in violation.

A player who is found in violation by either communicating in an illegal channel, or using an off topic channel to gain an advantage will be penalized by receiving 0 points and 0 garnets on their next Decoder phase, regardless of a correct answer.

A player who violates the limited communication rule a second time will receive automatic Elimination Candidate status.

Gameplay:

This game will take course as players will try to encode and decode messages in three phases: Messenger phase, Encoder phase, and Decoder phase. Each phase will be played twice. Thus, this Main Match will span 6 days.

At the beginning of the game, each team will have 0 credits, and players will have the ability to spend into the negative in order to accomplish things.

During the Messenger phase, players will design a secret phrase to be sent through their team and be encoded and decoded by the other two team members. You will submit a phrase containing between 1-10 words. A phrase is short if it contains between 1-3 words, whereas a phrase is long if it contains between 4-10 words. A phrase that is a short phrase can be any combination of words, while a phrase that is a long phrase must follow English grammar rules and pass the check at https://www.grammar.com/grammar_check.php . A phrase is short if it contains between 1-3 words, whereas a phrase is long if it contains between 4-10 words. During the second Messenger phase, you may not use any of the nouns or verbs that have appeared in a secret phrase used by your team thus far.

During the Encoder phase, players are tasked with converting the secret phrase that is sent to them by their team member into a secret code. The words in the secret code being used will use letters that come from a letter board that outlines the costs of English alphabet letters. None of the words used in the secret code can be the same as the words in the secret phrase. These secret codes do not have to succeed at the grammar check, but each word must exist in the English dictionary at https://www.dictionary.com/ .

Whenever you use a letter from your letter board, its cost increments by 1. This cost takes place instantly, even within the same secret code. Thus, if a letter has a cost of 3, and you use it 3 times in your secret code, it will cost 3 + 4 + 5 credits, totaling a use of 12 credits.

This is the letter board that every player will begin with:

During the Decoder phase, players will receive the secret code from their team member and must reverse the secret code back into the original secret phrase. You will be informed what the number of words in the secret phrase is in order to aid in correctly figuring out the message. For each word guessed correctly, your team will score 10 credits. For a fully correct phrase guessed correctly, you will score a bonus 40 credits. Additionally, with a fully correct phrase, each member of the team will gain 1 garnet. This means that a phrase containing 10 words can earn up to 140 credits and 1 garnet each.

After every round, the number of credits that each team has is publicly announced. This is the only information that will be released publicly for all players to see during the game.

While a player is in control of a message for their team, once per round they may spend credits to reveal the first letter of a word of their choice from one of the words in the string. This hint will be available to the upcoming players that the word will pass through. For the Messenger, this costs 6 credits. For the Encoder, this costs 9 credits. For the Decoder, this costs 12 credits. It is possible that multiple players on a team will take this action, and so it is possible to reveal multiple first letters of words to increase your chances of success.

While a player is in control of a message for their team, once per round they may spend 2 garnet to reveal an entire word from the string. This hint will be passed along to the players ahead of them in their team in the same way.

Note 1: Words that are similar either by difference of conjugation or plurality will be accepted during the guess - for example, snake/snakes would both be accepted, and walk/walks/walked/walking would all be accepted in addition to any other changes in conjugation.

Note 2: The direction that codes are sent around the table will switch after the first Decoder phase has ended.

Note 3: It is not announced which players of each team get their phrases correct or incorrect. Additionally, it is not revealed which player you are sending your secret phrases and secret codes to.

Sabotage Items:

During the Encoder phase, you may purchase exactly 1 sabotage item and target exactly 1 player from any of the 12 players in the game to use it on. Each sabotage item will have an effect on the secret code that the target player receives during their Decoder phase. These cost different numbers of credits to use. The following are the sabotage items, with prices in parenthesis:

Vowel Kaboom (30) - Remove all vowels

Letter Scramble Damble (30) - Randomly scrambles all of the letters in each word

Imposter Among Us (15) - Insert a word at a position of your choice

Shuffle Shazaam (15) - Randomly shuffles the word order

Players will not be informed who has sabotaged, nor will they be informed that they were even sabotaged at all.

Note 4: The letter ‘Y’ is considered a consonant

Note 5: When selecting a word to insert with Imposter Among Us, you should specify where a word goes with language such as “Before the 1st word” or “After the 3rd word.” If you were to use the latter example, but the secret code only contained 2 words, then the word would just be applied to the end.

Result:

The 3 players in the team with the most credits at the end will all obtain Tokens of Life.

If two or three teams tie for the most number of credits, then the one player from each of these teams that used the fewest credits among their team will obtain Tokens of Life.

The team with the fewest credits will be the 3 Elimination Candidates. The players will receive picking order in the order of who spent the fewest credits to the most.

If two or three teams tie for the fewest number of credits, then the winning players will select Elimination Candidates and assign a picking order to them.

Example Submission:

The following depicts a sample submission for each phase

Messenger: My secret phrase is “I like the beach.” Spend 6 credits to reveal the first letter of the first word.

(Announcer to Encoder): Your Messenger has sent “I like the beach.” The first letter of the first word is currently revealed.

Encoder: My secret code is “Me enjoy ocean sand” Spend 9 credits to reveal the first letter of the second word.

(Announcer to Decoder): Your Encoder has sent “Me enjoy ocean sand” The secret phrase contains 4 words. The first letter of the first word is ‘I’ and the first letter of the second word is ‘L’

Decoder: My guess is “I love the beach.”

As a result of this, the player has guessed 3 words correctly. It is not revealed to them what they got wrong in the phrase. They will score 30 credits, and no garnets.

If the player were to correctly guess “I like the beach,” then the team will gain 80 credits and 1 garnet each.

Clarification: The term Secret Phrase is associated with the message that is generated during the Messenger Phase, while the term Secret Code is associated with the encoded message that is generated during the Encoder Phase.

If these terms are confusing, feel free to interchange them with Message Phrase and Encoded Phrase.

Clarification: Use of Discord features such as reactions, nickname changes, description changes, channel creation or channel editing are able to be considered a communication violation and result in a penalty. Also note that violation of Server Rule 4 would also constitute a communication violation.

Clarification: 👀 asking somebody else who is not a player to deliver a message for you is also a communication violation please stop doing this to me

Addendum: If you are found to be making a major violation of the limited communication rule, you may be subjected to the second penalty without warning rather than the first penalty. This is based on dealer discretion. An example of something that would result in this would be directly dictating Secret Phrase answers or encoding solutions to members of your team.

Addendum: Since Emojis can be found in the dictionary resource that we are using in this Main Match, you may use them as part of your Secret Code. If you do, their cost would correspond to the letters in the name of the Emoji as it is named in Discord. Example: 🙂 would have the cost of 'slight smile'

Conversely, since Emojis are not accepted in the grammar check resource that we are using, you may not use them as part of your Secret Phrase.

Correction: "Each sabotage item will have an effect on the secret code that" has been corrected to "Each sabotage item will have an effect on the secret code that the target player receives during their Decoder phase."

Addendum: If the only error that the grammar check is returning is the use of a proper noun that it does not recognize, then your submission can still be accepted as valid. Proper nouns are legal to use.

Addendum: Similarly, proper nouns are legal to use in your Secret Code during the Encoder phase.

Clarification: Punctuation is not allowed to be used in the Secret Code - your Secret Code can only be made up of words, which are made up of the letters from your Letter Board.

There is one exception to this, which is that hyphenated words are allowed. In which case, the hyphen is free.

Clarification: From the rule which specifies that words must be included in the English dictionary at our dictionary resource site, the word must have the tag "British" to indicate that is a part of the English dictionary. If it does not contain that tag, then it is considered to not be part of the English dictionary and is not allowed.

The previous addendum which allowed Emojis to be used in Secret Codes will still stand, despite not containing the "British" tag on their entries.

Addendum: In addition to hyphens, apostrophes are considered a legal punctuation for words which are possessive or are contractions