Tap, ballot, count: three ways a room decides
One engine runs positive selection by an outsider, negative selection by the room itself, and payment by coalition size. Which one a room uses inverts what every other rule in it is worth.
Tap, in Midnight List
An outsider, the host, taps three of eight people for the afterparty at beats 10, 16 and 20. Positive selection from outside the politics: nobody in the room has a vote, so alliances are only ever leverage on visibility.
The taps are spread across the night instead of saved for the end, so an early tap takes you out of danger for the rest of it. That creates a class of people who are already safe and now merely useful, which is where half the room's cruelty comes from.
Ballot, in The Cut (archived)
Seven writers, two chairs, and the room votes somebody off every fourth beat: 4, 8, 12, 16, 20. Negative selection from inside, so the same visibility that wins on the rooftop is what gets you named here, and every alliance is a vote you are trying not to be the target of.
It is archived instead of deleted, still watchable at its URL and still in the test matrix, because "peers vote you out" turned out to be a narrower room than "alliances are the whole game".
Count, in The Syndicate
Nobody is ever removed. Twelve players, 300 chips, and three counts at beats 8, 16 and 24, where the cage pays the biggest crew and splits it evenly. You leave with whatever is in front of you, and only the three biggest piles walk out ahead, so a crew that shared everything four ways finds that out at last call.
Removing elimination entirely is what let alliance size become the mechanic. Once nobody can be thrown out, the only question left is who you are sitting with and how many ways the money has to go.
The lesson
You do not need different rules to get a different simulation. You need a different way of choosing a winner. Trust, heat, standing, rumours and betrayal are shared verbatim across all three rooms; invert the selection and every one of them means something else.
Read next
Rooms are data, physics is code
A room is a plain RoomSpec: cast, personality rigs, locations, an action menu, two room-specific questions, ticker templates. Adding one should mean adding one file and never touching the engine.
Why a crew may only lead by one
crewCap() stops a crew recruiting once it is two clear of the field, because without it the room finds a dull equilibrium where eleven people sit together, win every count, and each take ten chips.
Trust, heat and standing
Three quantities carry the politics. Trust is private and pairwise, heat is how much attention is on you, standing is what the room thinks of you, and only trust can buy an alliance.
What a beat is
A beat is the simulation's unit of slow time, fifteen seconds of wall clock and twenty or twenty-four to a party. It is the only moment at which heat cools, energy returns, trust drifts and a room makes a decision.