I have not stated anything about the game which is being played. I have only given my opinion of the rules and clarifications.
To make it absolutely clear: I have only stated an opinion that the rules favor the detectives based on the fact they get 3 moves per 1 fugitive move and they can kill a group with 3 eyes. Nothing more.
I have no intention of interfering with a game in progress. I apologize if my comments were mis-interpreted as such.
I don’t think I’d notice a stone missing. Some of the stones were semi-randomly placed, and there’s also been various non-game variations shown, so I don’t really have a mental image where half the stones are 
I can do “spot-the-difference” ok though, but I don’t necessarily think I would do that between every round, unless something confused me with the flow or the discussion, or that something looked odd.
Just to clarify, @NeilAgg is not in the kibitz thread, and hence I believe that their comments are only just about the general variant and rules and not specific to the ongoing game. I wanted to make this clarification in order to dispel any potential remaining thoughts that their views could have been formed on the hidden information of the ongoing game.
Frankly, I’m not sure if the current configuration of 3 detectives on 17x17 is fundamentally fair or biased towards one team. At least with bidding, each side should have believed (a priori) that they were receiving at least a balanced game. I do believe that a roughly fair balance should exist between the number of detectives and the size of the board, but trouble is finding it, which we may only get a loose grasp of by playing a lot of games. Maybe another variation to consider is a team of fugitives (but still fewer than the detectives). At least, that would give three parameters to tune! Figuring out a balance between the team sizes and other game parameters, as well as the public discussion of a team figuring out what to do, kind of reminds me of the werewolf game.
I joked above about Twister, but maybe a concept from that game could be adapted to reveal information to the detectives. Rather than allowing the detectives to ask questions, or having the fugitive state the shape of their moves, maybe we could introduce public randomness that constrains how the fugitive could move. Instead of spinning a wheel to get “Left Hand on Red”, we could ask discobot to publicly pick the quadrant, distance from the edge, or some other shape/location constraint on the fugitive’s next move.
Here’s another idea for a possible clue-giving system. After each turn the fugitive reveals the shape of their stones relative to each other. In other words, take the actual game position, delete all detective stones and star-point markings on the board as well as the edge of the board and the grid is extended, so the detectives don’t know where exactly on the board is this shape.
For example, after the first move the shape is always …
After the second fugitive move, it may look as follows
Note that the detectives don’t know which of these was played first. After even more moves the shape may look like this:
This gives the detectives a strong hint, so finding a balanced game between X detectives on a board of size Y will be a challenge again.
I realised there is an unintentional side-effect, namely the fugitive can’t really play shapes that are far apart. In the extreme case where the fugitive plays two corner points diagonal to each other, the detectives could deduce exactly where the stones are. Even if we take away the star points and the edge of the following board …
… the corner points are the only intersection wich are 18 diagonal steps apart from each other, and so the detectives would get full information.
Similarly, if the stones are not quite as extreme but still far apart, the number of possibilities is low.
In order to mitigate this effect, perhaps we could change the clue slightly. That is by taking the board (withhout detective stones, of course), erasing all borders and star-points, and the fugitive may apply a toroidal translation to the board. So in the above example, the two corner points can then be shown as a kosumi-shape:
Of course the detectives know that the shown shape is subject to toroidal translation. This way the number of possibilities should hopefully be independent on how far apart the fugitive plays.
One downside is that its kind of complicated.
What about this idea?
If the fugitive makes a living shape, the fugitive wins.
If not, the detectives must kill off the fugitive, but once they do, the game reverts to a 3 player game where the winner is decided by normal go rules.
That way, the detectives have a little bit of an uneasy alliance. They have to play as a team but also realize they can’t give away too much to their friends.
Giving shape info seems to give a lot of information to the detectives, IMHO.
Or make it exciting: four detectives, but one of them is secretly actually also the fugitive (and needs to win as the fugitive).
I am sure I won’t be much of a challenge!
Its not about winning or losing, its about the experience and the friends we make along the way 
And they can meet to vote someone out…
Supposing there was enough interest, it could be fun (could it?) to have a 9x9 board and have a separate league table for some of N=2,3,4,5,… detectives.
The goal of surviving as long as possible might not be the best since one can just keep placing hopeless invisible stones until everything left is suicide/forbidden, even in the case of large number of detectives.
Instead maybe one could have a variant to evade capture of any fugitive stone for as long as possible (kind of like atari go), where the fugitive loses once they lose a single stone, then the number of turns the player survived for gets added with their name to the league table.
Sure, to some extent it’s a tad bit luck based, since there’s possibly random guessing and maybe it depends on the strategy of the players playing detective each round, but sure lots of arcade games have a bit of randomness to them
(Maybe one could look at adding in a rule for bonus points for each stone the fugitive captures or for stones that are alive etc, that get added to the score of number of rounds survived – I just expect there to be a transition from possible to live ~2 detectives to everything dies with 5,6,7…? detectives, but maybe bonuses could depend on N=number of detectives.)
I think the scoring system should be more like regular Go. Count open spaces and/or territory owned by the fugitive.
You’re assuming that the fugitive actually survives, but I’m thinking in the case of 4,5,6 detectives on a 9x9 where I can’t imagine any stone surviving 
It’s probably similar though with area scoring counting the stones/area together I suppose.
I think area scoring might lead to a more diverse range of scores too, whereas it’s likely on 9x9 to just end up being the eyes that are territory
Imagine red the fugitive and something like this after two turns
You are correct, I was assuming zero points if the fugitive dies. Maybe I don’t know enough to say much, but that seems OK to me. I think in any case it is going to be hard to create a good ranking/scoring system for this variant.
I can’t imagine any possibility of the fugitive surviving on 9x9 with 5 detectives, even if they are all 30 kyu players AND high on drugs!
That was kind of the idea though, make it like a highscore board with who evades a capture the longest.
Thinking about the detectives as a group, we can reduce the team to the player of the highest rank among the group (Since he/she will be able to advise the others) who gets N moves per turn. That helps reduce the complexity of scoring.
Maybe we don’t try to compare disparate games. Each unique set of circumstances will have a ladder and players move up and down according to win/loss. A unique combination will be:
Hmmm. I just thought about the ladder idea. How do players “challenge” each other? More thought is needed.
I think this sounds too complicated for what I was suggesting.
I suggested a situation (9x9 board) that was going to be fairly hard for the fugitive, quoting yebellz idea of alternate goals for the fugitive.
If the fugitive is expected to lose, one just counts how long they lasted and makes a leaderboard out of it for fun.
I don’t think it matters what rank the detectives are, once there’s enough of them all they need to do is play their stones connected to their last stone and there’s no way they’ll get captured.
Maybe for that reason it’s just a bad idea, and it probably won’t be fun with say 4/5 defectives, although in comparison to some arcade games, sometimes the end goal is not to win but just get a high score and think those can still be fun.
Yeah, I think getting slaughtered would not be fun. The fugitive has to have a reasonable chance of making a living group.
