Mafia VIII: Return of the Recommencement of the Revenge of the Mafia [Concluded]

[KukriKhan]

Google actually has an entry for S A N S N I V (near bottom of page). It's in French, and I think (not being a french-speaker) it refers to educational levels in a survey. "Sans niv indicating 'without formal education'. French speakers can gratefully correct me, please. What that might have to do with our game, or identifying a player, I dunno. Just throwing it out there as something to pursue if other evidence refers back.

Would GH go so far as to resort to a French word ('sans') to be included as a twist-clue? Maybe. It's fairly common English borrowing-usage.

Nevertheless, his correction of 'chargees' (where he explains that 'charges' was correct usage, he thought (correctly)) leads me to believe we are on the right track pursuing individual alphabetical letters to suss out clues, not the pages-wrapped-in-envelopes type of letters.

So, 7 letters/characters so far. With no doubt, more to come. Based on the numbers of players, I'd guess we have about 9-10 more day/night cycles to go. If GH goes to pattern, the 'message' to the town could be up to 9 more characters/letters. But to win, we town will need to solve the puzzle/cryptogram in the next 3-4 phases, lest the bad guy's killing abilities exceed our remaining numbers.

So: S A N S N I V plus 4 more letters to reveal something that might (might) help us. On top of, of course, the usual psychoanlaysis we do.

I see that Seamus has applied a crypto rule he's familiar with; anyone else friendly with letter-substitution schemes, or sequence-pattern paradigms?

-pause for dinner-

and we might also consider the source of the 'watch the letters' clue. What might have motivated him to utter such a phrase, on the event of his death?

[Csargo]

Putting it in backwards gets you a shiplog and a kid from Norway a couple people down is a guy named Sigurd. Also, Navians which is mostly google hits about Scandinavia.

Propellor is also misspelled, should be propeller.

[naut]

So the letters are S A N S N I V (E?). I really don't know how they're going to help us though.

[Privateerkev]

I've been discounting misspelled words since the "hint" said to look for "missing" letters. There are at least 3 misspelled words total left in the reports. I've just ignored them for the purpose of this exercise.

Same reason why I've ignored the guy with the hurt nose. Ichigo figured out what letters should have been put in but we have not been using them.

[Sigurd]

I guess the hidden message might be in French since the clue were in French.
Sans niv...
I have French in my clue dictionary and there are not too many words that starts with niv.
Either a form of niveau (level), nivéole (snowflake) or nivôse (fourth month of Republican calendar).
Maybe someone else has a bigger dictionary.

[Andres]

I believe GH speaks at least a bit of French, so the message being in French is certainly a possibility.

makaikhaan should know better then to attack Tiberius who always behaves like this in mafia games. And I'm getting bad vibes from FactionHeir as well.

Why the FoS on TinCow, Sasaki?

EDIT: oh, and can someone dig up PK's corpse and lynch it again? Not knowing the difference between hockey and soccer football

[Sarathos]

I've been discounting misspelled words since the "hint" said to look for "missing" letters. There are at least 3 misspelled words total left in the reports. I've just ignored them for the purpose of this exercise

I was going to say somethinga bout those, but I wasn't sure either. Could be it GH's intention or just some simply mistake, though it would be handy to remember those words just incase.

Just a crazy idea I had, what if we are looking at these letters the wrong way. What if the word isn't actually SANSNIV, but VINSANS...? I have done a little bit on reasearcj on it but haven't come up with anything so far.

[FactionHeir]

you guys found the clue while I was sleeping!
Anyway. I found the use of the word "puttering" a bit odd as well. freedictionary links it to pottering for some reason.
Maybe its missing a S at the start?
On the other hand, if we go back to the write ups, there was no missing in D1, but 2 in D2, and discounting what I just said, 1 in D3.
This suggests he forgot one in D1 and thus had an extra one in D2.

Also, note that the Day writeup missing letters are always at the start of the word while the missing letters in the N write ups so far where in the middle or end of the word. This may have some significance.