Game flow communication and organization

Which experts solve which kinds of modules?

Do the experts interrupt the defuser when they're ready?

How do you minimize the idle expert time? (Preferably, while not causing too much hassle.)

Defuser: The screen says "OKAY". Expert 1: Bottom right. Defuser: "NO". The screen says 3. Expert 2: Position 3. Defuser: Label 4. Go. Expert 1: "BLANK", "UHHH", "WAIT" Defuser (interrupts): got it. The screen says "YOUR"

In which case the game's been probably ruined for you already.

Setting up conventions is something you want to talk about before meeting the bomb. How does your expert take Memory? Who's good at Wire Sequences? When does the defuser take her answers? These are things you want to know in advance. See thesection for some ideas.A really good thing to do is to give the general information in the beginning, since for most of it you don't even need the lights. You want the last digit of the serial number, whether there's an a vowel, whether there's a parallel port, and the number of batteries. You might also want to name all the lit indicators, although this can be tricky. In the current version you only care about a couple of them, and if you know those, you can name them or say "no indicators". If you don't know the currently needed indicators, weigh the risk of having to look around and answer the question against the time it takes to name the ones lit.Considering the last digit, it is better to just give the number rather than whether it's even. There are two reasons for that. The first is mental work for the defuser: yes, it isn't much work at all, but such things do add up over the course of the bomb. It's the small distractions that take away most of the energy. (Surprisingly, it's an empirical fact that there can be no small distractions on the expert's side, nothing bothers them. Maybe that's because it's not them who have a ticking problem, I don't know.) The second reason is this: hopefully, you give an expert a lot of information in rapid succession, so she has no time to write "even" or "odd". Whenever I was an expert and someone threw "the last digit is even" at me, I'd just pick a random even number and write it down, because it'd been less annoying. Same went for "there's more than one battery".When approaching a problem, there are three general questions you want to ask and answer.The third one is really tricky. Apart from giving out the general information, defuser is only talking to one expert at any given moment. It would be good to keep the other experts busy at the same time, but that requires talking to them, in which time it would be good if everybody else had something to do. Giving away a time consuming problem (like Complicated Wires) consumes much time, while if you hit someone with the Button information, it can be solved very fast as well.I will describe the approach we've come to use with a couple of friends I've made from the game community. It is the best I've seen, and if there are better ones, I'm really curious as to how they would work. We've been able to beat "I am hardcore" with just under a minute of spare time without the defuser memorizing any parts of the manual. It didn't feel like the limit, or being close to it.We would have a heavy lifter who gets, in that order, Complicated Wires, Passwords, Mazes, and Morse Codes. The defuser takes turns in giving info on those modules to the heavy lifter, intermixing it with throwing bits of information (like the Button, or the Simon Says color) at other experts. When this information is passed, the defuser collects output from other experts, then proceeds to work with those other experts on tasks that require two-way communication (Wire Sequences, Who's on First, Memory). Lastly, the defuser would get the output from the heavy lifter. Depending on the number of experts and their muscles, heavy lifting could be split. The general rule "the heavy lifter doesn't interrupt, unless to ask" then spreads to all the baby heavy lifters.A nice detail is that Who's on First and Memory can be done with two experts in parallel, more or less as follows:And so on. Wire Sequence is also doable in parallel with something else (apart from another Sequence, have mercy on me), although with more time waste (since, given a good expert, the only time to save is between triplets). Who's on First itself can be split between two experts, one doing Stage 1 and another Stage 2, but that seems to save no more than few seconds overall.Having a game plan is somewhat essential for the process, unless you're so good you can avoid time waste on the fly.When analyzing a loss, make sure to pay attention to times when the defuser could have given out quick information that calls for longer processing, like Simple Wires or the Button, but also, which expert should prepare for which module. A defuser having to wait for an expert to scroll down half the manual to Wire Sequences is an example of how one little phrase thrown in between could have saved up to ten seconds. Over the course of 11 modules this adds up to up to half a minute or more.The next section describes best practices in communicating the module information both ways.