We recently got to play Mafia with some of the changes proposed in my previous Mafia post.
The Changes
Specifically, we discarded the Detective entirely and played with two “Elders” on the side of the Civilians. (Elders are what we ended up calling the character type that my previous post called the Police). We used my previous post’s Method 1; during the pre-game phase, the Elders got to see who all the Elders were, and that was the extent of their powers. Additionally, we put a constraint on the Elders that they were a new victory condition for the Mafia — if all the Elders die, the Mafia win. This was designed to prevent the Elders from announcing themselves publicly.
We also introduced an entirely new mechanic to the game — we allowed private note passing. In theory, there was nothing stopping anyone from doing this in our previous games, we just made it an officially condoned part of the game.
Thoughts
I liked the way the Elders replaced the role of the Detective. Traditionally the Detective would start a game knowing that one other person was a Civilian. In our game, two people started the game with this information, making turn one at least slightly more interesting1. Removing the swing mechanic that the Detective brings to the game was also a positive change.
I really liked the note-passing mechanic. As expected, there were a lot of unnecessary/joke notes flying around, but this was arguably a good thing — it made passing real notes much less noticeable among the noise of the joke notes. As an Elder, I managed to use the note-passing mechanic to my advantage2. Mike also speculates that note-passing would make the Mafia much more interesting if there were two or more of them in a game — I agree.
I still kind of felt like the “turn one problem” still existed, if in a slightly reduced form. At this point, I’m not sure how to solve it entirely. Adding more information to the game on turn one at this point seems too powerful. In the past, we’ve relied on noise-making as a catalyst for accusation-making — people seem to either be getting stealthier or deafer, and there were no such accusations during our two games. Maybe a solution to the turn one problem involves forcing the Mafia to do something more complicated during the night, like ask the moderator if a certain person is an Elder or not. This would not only make the Mafia potentially louder during the night, it would also give them a reason to speak up during turn one, since they would have more specific targets in mind.
We encountered a problem that at some points in the game, it was statistically favorable for the Elders to come straight out and declare their Elderhood. I felt like this was a lame conclusion to the game and so I didn’t do it, but that temptation is a problem. It would definitely be lame to come right out and declare it, but how lame is it to declare it privately to one person in a note? (I ended up doing this.) If that isn’t lame, would it be lame to send that note to another person, or two? Where do you draw the line?
1. I played one game as an Elder, and fired out a foundless accusation at Matt on turn one (Matt turned out to be a regular Civilian). I felt like this foundless accusation was a good move because it started up a conversation and it reduced the random turn-one-lynching from a full pool of 7 to an Elderless pool of 5 (assuming people went with my accusation).
2. At a point in the game when I felt like I could trust that Jessica was a Civilian, I sent her a note declaring that I was an Elder. I sent another note to my Elder-companion Culver telling him what I had just told Jessica. That way, if I died during the night, he would be able to avenge me.