Forum Mafia - Any Interest?

From Wikipedia:

Mafia (Russian: Ма́фия, also known as Werewolf, Assassin, Witch Hunt, Palermo Nights or Pirates) is a party game created in theUSSR by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986,^[3] modelling a battle between an informed minority (the mafia) and an uninformed majority (the townspeople). Players are secretly assigned roles: either mafia, who know each other; or townspeople, who know only the number of mafia amongst them. In the game's night phase the mafia covertly "murder" a townsperson. During the day phase, all of the surviving players debate the identities of the mafia and vote to eliminate a suspect. Play continues until all of the mafia have been eliminated, or until the mafia outnumber (or equal) the townspeople.

EXAMPLE - Analysis of a mafia game from TeamLiquid, not trying to promote TL mafia as I don't play there anymore. The thread in the link will show you an example game and a VERY good players analysis of the events in said game. The game in question was played by many experienced players and probably has a lot of jargon that will be unfamiliar but hopefully it will help you gain a general idea of what mafia is.

Mafia, although usually a party game, is a game that I think is best played through a message board format (realtime chat formats like epicmafia or irc are astoundingly bad and unbalanced). Similar in style to games like The Ship or Spy Party (or even Assassin's Creed multiplayer, to an extent), Mafia is a competitive game that focuses on analyzing the behavior of other players.

The town faction and mafia faction all communicate in the thread during the two phases of the game (a 48 hour day cycle and 24 hour night cycle). However, the mafia are the only faction allowed to communicate with each other outside of the game thread. Only careful behavioral analysis will reveal the identities of the mafia as they try their best to act like good townsfolk and disrupt the discussion to keep the heat off of themselves. The game is best played with 11-30 players.

Town must look for certain tells (evidence of players having outside communication, bad or empty accusations, wishiwashiness and many others) and are given the hard task of differentiating between bad town players and actual mafia. Mafia must try their best to remain unsuspicious and avoid incriminating their teammates. A good mafia disrupts the town and encourages the lynch mobs that form around falsely accused town players.

There are a lot of options a host has to make his game interesting: from unique flavor (themed games, based on movies/original settings/video games/whatever) to special roles and abilities that are granted to players. It's kind of hard to explain in such a short post but it really is a blast especially if you fancy yourself as an armchair detective (or psychologist). There is a ton of depth to the game, really only limited to the analysis skills and imagination of the players in it. I used to host/play games pretty often at TeamLiquid and now that I've drifted away from that community, I'd be interested to see if the game could flourish at GiantBomb as well. Hopefully I've explained it well, if I actually created a gamethread would anyone be interested in giving it a try? If you have any questions about the game, go ahead and ask because I've only given a very bare explanation of what it is. It's kind of like a pen and paper rpg in that it's hard to really convey what the experience is like without actually throwing someone into a game.

This sounds potentially awesome? I'm still not entirely clear how the Mafia is meant to get caught or what tells there are but as you said yourself, kind of hard to explain in such a short post.

I'd be up for something like this.

This sounds cool, i'm a little weary. I guess, show us like a screenshot of an example mafia thread. Or a chat.

Sounds alright, though!

@cloudenvy: Usually town has special roles that can act at night as well. Such as a detective who can choose a player to investigate once per night (by PMing the name of that player to the host) and then getting a PM back with that players alignment.

However:

1. The Detective can't simply announce his choices because then the mafia will know who he is and kill the player immediately.

2. In a game that has a cop, usually there is a "suspicious townie" role who will appear as mafia to the detective despite being town aligned. (The suspicious townie does not know they are a suspicious townie).

It comes down to determining which behaviors are indicative of a mafia alignment (which come with experience). For example, let's say the town is in a situation in a later day where there is a player(Player A) who is very obviously mafia or at least has a very good case against him. Another player (Player B) then comes up with a case on a completely different player (Player C)and encourages everyone to vote for that player instead. Upon close analysis of that persons case you find that they don't have very strong points. Maybe they are intentionally misrepresenting things that Player C had said earlier in the thread, or seem to be going out of their way to avoid commenting on the other more prominent case against Player A. That leaves a couple possibilities in my mind:

1. Player A is mafia and Player B is his teammate trying to protect him.

2. Player A is not mafia and Player B is mafia who feels pressured to put forth an original case. In his mind, this will make him seem helpful and engaged and will not appear as though he is a mafioso trying to hide behind an easy bandwagon.

3. Player A is or isn't mafia and Player B is simply a very bad townie.

What would I do as town in this case? Keep my vote on Player A. If Player A is lynched and flips "mafia", I will then strongly push the rest of the town to vote for Player B. Mafia can try to do things like intentionally defend townies to confuse the town, but the fact that the case was so bad would lead me to believe that the player has a good chance of being mafia anyway. Why would a town aligned player ignore a strong case or the discussion surrounding it to push a poorly constructed case?

One of my favorite tells is "parroting". Because mafia players communicate in secret outside of the thread (quicktopic/PM/IRC/skype/whatever they like), they will often edit eachothers posts. When you see a player starting to use specific words/phrasing that are the same as another player in the thread, I tend to assume they are mafia teammates. Certain posts have a very "pre-planned" or "edited" feel to them that are suspicious.

One very incriminating thing I came across in a game I played in was a statement like this. "Yeah, Player X is very suspicious and is probably mafia but I'm going to withhold voting for that player right now." I would immediately lynch any player that said that. If you think about it, there is absolutely no reason for a town player whose goal is to always find and lynch mafia to announce something like that.

In general, you're never going to always be right. I would say a player that gets about 70% of his guesses by Day 2/3 correct to be an extremely good mafia hunter. For players who don't like the subjective part of analyzing behavior, they can look at more objective things like voting records and the way that special roles/actions behave in the game to try to catch mafia as well.

Ah yes, I've heard of this game as Werewolf. Sure, I'd be up to give it a go, although I haven't played it before.

My only question would be whether this breaks the forum rules here, and won't be allowed for the mods. It might be the sort of thing that has to be relegated to the forums of an object, perhaps.

I used to play this at summer camp when I was a kid, it's an awesome game. I can't imagine it's that great without being able to read people's faces though.

I would love to play!

We used to play Mafia a fair amount in high school. I know I've seen it played on other forums, but, to me, it seems way worse than playing it in person. I suppose if you didn't know any better it'd be fun, though.

I would try it, sure.. I think I'll look up a YouTube, cuz I don't know shit. Um. ~ I'm game.

I found this link

http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Newbie_Guide

I believe this is the game you're talking about? This wiki guide is fairly easy to follow.

Sounds interesting, but I'd have to read up a little more on how it works.

I disagree. I've played the game many times both ways (as well as over VOIP/IRC/etc.) and I really like forum games the best. Because mafia is so dependent on quality player input to have a good game, you can of course have a terrible game through any format.

Party mafia has really easy facial/vocal reads and the game is much quicker. Much more casual. That's fine, not a bad experience at all but forum mafia is a totally different game. Because a forum thread creates a log of every players input, cases are built around a players entire post history. Analysis is much more involved and requires a player to read between the lines, examine a players arguments against their history of posting and try to discern what the intent of their every action is rather than looking for facial cues like shifting eyes and nervous tics. Over a message board, it's a much slower and intense experience I think.

That's correct. Mafiascum has its own sort of metagame though so not everything on that wiki applies universally but a lot of the information is good. Particularly the article on WIFOM and some of the common logical errors. I find that the section on mafia tells in general is pretty lacking though, I think the game is too subjective to really play it based on strict rules of behavior.

Put me down for it. I know how to play on a forum.

O_O

I luuuve Mafia! :D

Be it at a party, a summer camp, a forum/message board, or the Starcraft 2 custom map- I've played it and loved it. :P

Hoping we get enough interested in this- Count me in. ^_^

@warlockengineermoredakka: How is the SC2 version? I have fond memories of "The Thing UMS" in BroodWar. I really need to get The Ship some time.

I fear people will gloss over this thread assuming it's somehow connected to the godawful facebook mafia game.

heh. The funny thing is that you don't realize there already is a Giant Bomb mafia. :)