I'll try to do this, but I've just played so many games that they all blur into each other a bit...
Player track application:Well, picking out a good town game is difficult because in your best town games you die early and then you don't tend to remember them as well. I think I'll put forward
xkcd Mafia, where I lived through to the end to see a flawless town victory that had me end up on every scum wagon. I also remember having a run of 3 consecutive town games where we managed to lynch scum D1 sometime in the M70s.
One of my most cherished scum games is most certainly
RMM28. I got a Mafia Traitor role that didn't know the other mafia, figured out who one of my partners was, and worked hard to keep them alive through to the end. I think the final important mislynch was preceded by a long discussion with (town!)iguana, and it would be years from this game until iguana started trusting me again...
I feel like I've lost some of my ability to spot scum early over the years; these days, it usually takes me until D3 before I really start making good cases. I'm not sure how this happened, maybe I just used to have more time on my hand to think about things, but it would be nice to get back to my earlier form.
Moderator track application:One of the favorite games I designed was
Firefly Mafia. It was a small game and in order to offest the swinginess and early ending of small games, I turned it into a Mafia/Resistance hybrid. I think it worked out really well, and in the end it was so close that it was hard to even call the winner, so I feel like the balance turned out really nicely, which is especially hard to achieve when you try out new concepts like this.
A normal game design that I still remember fondly is
Night Vale Mafia. It had an open setup that worked just very well, and it was strange enough to capture the theme.
One of my bigger regrets is
Sherlock Mafia. First of all, its roles were too complicated to really make it a normal game. And second, my main idea of the Moriarty character ended up not really working since it turns out players are just happy to jump to their QTs without reading the role carefully. It ended up playing out not the way I wanted at all and I should have added more precautions for that.