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I spent some time today thinking about Mafia. In my play group, the game has always had the same problem on the first turn — nobody has any information except the Mafia, and everyone knows it. Nobody wants to accuse anyone, because the natural conclusion is that accusers are in the Mafia. After all, Civilians generally have no information, so for someone to claim to have information makes them a target of suspicion. This generally devolves into a random first-turn kill, which sucks for the person who died, and is statistically good for the Mafia.

Our short-term patch was to give the Detective a pre-first-turn guess, which A) isn’t usually much of a help (if they pick a Civilian) and B) can be too much of a swing (if they pick a Mafia).

Here are my proposed solutions:

Create a new character type – The Police
I thought of two ways that this character could work, and both methods could be used for varying sized games. What’s common to both methods is that there will be two or more Police characters, and they are on the side of the Civilians. The Police generally want to keep their identities hidden from the rest of the players.

Method 1:
At the beginning of the game during the pre-first-turn phase, the moderator has the Police all open their eyes and look at each other. This is the only special ability the Police have — after this phase, they act as normal Civilians. This creates a small circle of trust between a few of the Civilians, which gives them a much-needed advantage, especially in the first turn. This creates a first-turn situation in which a large number of players have an incentive to influence who gets killed, and more importantly, people who try to guide the discussion are no longer targets of suspicion. Of course, the Mafia will be looking out for people who seem to be confident or agree with each other all the time, so the Police need to be careful not to make themselves obvious targets. I envision there being 2 or 3 Police characters in a game.

Method 2:
Mostly the same as Method 1, except there is a secret chain of command in the Police. To explain by way of example, let’s say there are three Police cards, a Jack, a Queen and a King. During the pre-first-turn phase, the person holding the Jack does something to identify himself, like putting his finger on his nose (keeping his eyes closed). Then, the Queen opens her eyes, and sees who has the Jack. The queen then closes her eyes and puts her finger on her nose. The King then opens his eyes and sees who both the Jack and the Queen are. In this way, each Police character can either trust or be trusted by one or more people, but that trust is one way. The King will take care to listen to the Jack and Queen, but knows that they will be suspicious of anything he tries to tell them. The Jack will know that two people in the room are listening to him, but does not know who those people are. This method, being not as powerful as Method 1, would hopefully allow for more Police characters in a game.

Method 3:
Use either Method 1 or 2, and grant the Police a nightly phase in which they “Arrest” a character. When the group wakes up, the moderator announces who was arrested during the night. Depending on how strong of an advantage we want to give to the Civilians, the arrested character could either A) not be allowed to talk, B) not be allowed to vote, or C) both A and B. This gives the Civilians some wiggle room for suspected Mafia members without having to outright kill them. It also gives the Mafia members another method for determining who the Police are so they can be killed off.

Eliminate or Modify the Detective
The Detective is too swingy to be fun. It sucks as a Mafia member to be targetted so specifically by the Detective — there’s virtually nothing you can do at that point except shut up and accept your fate. Unfortunately, since this situation is the ultimate goal of the Detective, I feel like the character is fundamentally flawed and should be removed from the game.

One way to make the Detective more interesting/playable would be to change the moderator’s response. Instead of the Moderator answering the question “Is this person a Mafia?”, they could answer the question “Is this person either a Mafia or a Police?”, to which they would respond either “Yes, that person is one of those types” or “No, that person is just a regular Civilian”. This does two things: Firstly, it vastly improves the chances that the Detective will get a positive response, which makes the Detective arguably more interesting to play, and secondly it vastly reduces the impact that a positive response has on a game. The Detective would still have to try to figure out from the conversation who he thinks is more trustworthy. Additionally, if a Detective knew that two people were both Mafia/Police, he would have to figure out whether those two people were on the same side or not — if they were not, he would know that at least one was Mafia (as long as he could be sure they were on different sides, anyway). This change would hopefully also make the Detective less of a Mafia target, making it more of a strategy for the Detective to claim to be the Detective (and more of a strategy for the Mafia to claim to be Detectives). You could even have two Detectives, which makes the situation where two (or three) people claim to be Detectives much more interesting.

Let me know your thoughts on these proposed changes. I’d be eager to try something new in the world of Mafia. Because the way we play, Mike’s just too dangerous to let live.