🛡️ The Shield of the Masses
The rule that decides who falls in each Initial Phase round. Getting it wrong does not always eliminate you: if you are wrong in good company, the Masses protect you.
Only one falls: the wrong faction with the fewest votes
In every round you pick one of the four factions and defend it with your argument. When Her Majesty reveals the answer, one faction is right and up to three are wrong. In the Initial Phase not everyone who is wrong falls: only the wrong faction with the fewest votes falls. The other wrong factions survive, sheltered by their numbers.
That is the Shield of the Masses: being in the largest wrong group protects you in that round. It does not make you right —you still got it wrong—, but you stay in the game. That is why the Quiz is not won by whoever knows most, but by whoever reads the crowd best.
A round with 150 votes
Imagine a round where the right answer was the Green faction. Red, Blue and Orange got it wrong. This is how the split looks:
Red and Blue were exactly as wrong as Orange, but Orange was the wrong faction with the fewest votes: only Orange falls. Red’s 80 and Blue’s 30 stay in the game even though they were wrong. And Green’s 37, of course, too.
If only one faction got it wrong, that one falls. A wrong faction with no votes at all does not count: the next wrong faction with the fewest votes falls, and if no wrong faction has any votes, nobody falls that day. If two or more wrong factions tie on the fewest votes, the round number (the one shown on each video) decides: in an even-numbered round all the tied factions fall; in an odd-numbered round they are all spared and nobody falls. The correct answer never falls, not with zero votes and not as the least voted.
The Masses are everyone who votes
Every valid comment on the round across all of the Queen’s official networks and in both languages —the Spanish court and the English one play the same round— is counted, added into a single tally: a faction is not protected on one network and dropped on another, nor saved in Spanish and dropped in English.
Those eliminated keep voting, and their vote counts for the Shield. Whoever falls can keep commenting on the following rounds: they no longer compete for the title, but they are part of the Masses and help decide which faction falls each day. It is deliberate: the conversation does not go quiet because someone fell.
Three things it does not protect you from
The Final Phase. In the last rounds of each game —between 3 and 5, harder— the Shield is gone: you are either right or you fall, majority or minority. Every round states its phase from the moment it is published.
The Queen’s Wrath. Her Majesty may settle an Initial Phase round without a Shield and eliminate every faction that got it wrong. It comes with a strict rule: it is declared before voting closes, blind, and the time is recorded; it is not announced, so it is only known when the result is published. One of the things that can unleash it: organised votes to manipulate the Shield.
Being wrong. The Shield keeps you in the game; it does not give you the answer. If you are after the title of Royal Courtier, it helps you survive a bad day, not win without getting it right: in the Final Phase you have to get them all.
Agreeing is playing; manufacturing votes is cheating
The Shield deliberately rewards reading the crowd: real people agreeing, persuading each other in the comments or switching faction after reading others is strategy, and it is allowed. You can also change faction until the close: your last valid comment counts.
What is not allowed is creating artificial entries —fake, duplicate or automated accounts— to inflate or sink a faction. Those votes do not count: they are annulled and the result is recalculated with the valid ones, no further process. There is no prize here and therefore nothing to claim; the only possible surprise is the Wrath.