Some thoughts about the setup:
- the setup seems to give reasoning models an inherent advantage because only they have a private plan and a public text in the same output. I feel like giving all models the option to formulate plans and keep track of other players inside <think> or <secret> tags would level the playing field more.
- from personal experience with social tasks for LLMs it helps both reasoning and non-reasoning LLMs to explicitly ask them to plan their next steps, in a way they are assured is kept hidden from all other players. That might be a good addition here either before or after the public subround
- the individual rounds are pretty short. Humans would struggle to coordinate in so few exchanges with so few words. If this was done for context limitations, asking models to summarize the game state from their perspective, then giving them only the current round, the previous round and their own summary of the game before that might be a good strategy.
It would be cool to have some code to play around with to test how changes in the setup change the results. I guess it isn't that difficult to write, but it's peculiar to have the benchmark but no code to run it yourself