Yeah, I knew my strategy would give me demerits if it gave me points. Thing is, I saw multiple possibilities for what Rule Four could be - and given only a single message to try them in, I had to try them all at once. I don't think I'll be changing my entry.
Which also means that everyone else has a chance to reach that winner's post!
[OOG First, thanks to Steave and Drachefly for inspiring me to get this game out of mothballs. I really enjoyed running it. And thanks to everyone who played.
Since no one got the Snitch, CCC wins on points, with Drache second.
There were three states to the game. State 1 = first person, State 2 = second person, State 3 = third person.
Every complete sentence counted as a play in the game. A perfectly efficient entry would have three plays, each one scoring 1 point, and no other sentences. The following are the shortest perfect entries for each round.
(Would have accepted any plural form of you. I think CCC used "all of you" and "you lot".
Demerits were any excess pronouns in a scoring sentence (unless it was the same pronoun, in which case it was a null). Plural pronouns were double points or double demerits.
CCCs. Kitobas. Drachefly and Steave.
In general, new rounds were usually inspired by non-scoring entries in old rounds. I liked the idea of the clues all being based on observing things that didn't seem like clues. For instance, the demerits in the first round were the clue to the second round.
I've always been a fan of analogies, so the temptation to make up a round strictly by analogy was too much to resist.
Round one I never got until it was over. Round Two I caught on to basically as soon as I had Round One, and shamelessly milked it for points. Round Three caught me out at first - I realised (after looking up 'proper nouns') that I had to use usernames, but at first I thought I merely had to refer to people in the first, second, and third persons.
Round four there were a few options, and so I cunningly sent a message that tried all of them. (Other options included various combinations of personal pronouns - myself, yourself, themselves - the only constant was the first-person second-person third-person linkage).
My idea on the last round was to entirely avoid pronouns and proper nouns altogether. As Kitoba noted, that achieved nothing.
By the way, what was the rule for automatically ending a round? I didn't quite get that.
I believe that was getting the full three points, one per sentence, in exactly three sentences (i.e. with zero non-scoring sentences).
Let's play Global Thermonuclear War..............now where's that Big Red Button?