OOC - Chronicles of a RPG's Junkie

Hello peeps, after a long absence I decided I would touch on a very diferent type of game from the ones I have covered here in the past.
So today we bring you:

MAFIA/WEREWOLF

Mafia, also known as Werewolf, is a party game created by Dmitry Davidoff in 1986 modelling a conflict between two groups: an informed minority (the mafia), and an uninformed majority (the innocents). At the start of the game, each player is secretly assigned a role affiliated with one of these teams. The game has two alternating phases: one, during which the mafia may covertly "murder" an innocent, and two, in which surviving players debate the identities of the mafia and vote to eliminate a suspect. The game continues until all of the mafia have been eliminated or until the mafia outnumbers the innocents.

Dmitry Davidoff is generally acknowledged as the game's creator. He dates the first game to spring 1987 at the Psychology Department of Moscow State University, spreading to classrooms, dorms, and summer camps of Moscow University. Wired attributes the creation to Davidoff but dates the first game to 1987,with 1986 being the year in which Davidoff was starting the work which would produce Mafia. He developed the game to combine psychology research with his duties teaching high school students.

Andrew Plotkin gave the rules a werewolf theme in 1997, arguing that the mafia were not that big a cultural reference, and that the werewolf concept fit the idea of a hidden enemy who looked normal during the daytime. Mafia and a variant called Thing have been played at science fiction writers' workshops since 1998, and have become an integral part of the annual Clarion and Viable Paradise workshops. The Werewolf variant of Mafia became widespread at major tech events, including the Game Developers Conference, ETech, Foo Camps, and South By Southwest. In 1998 the Kaliningrad Higher school of the Internal Affairs Ministry published the methodical textbook Nonverbal communications. Developing role-playing games 'Mafia' and 'Murderer' for a course on Visual psychodiagnostics, to teach various methods of reading body language and nonverbal signals. In September 1998 Mafia was introduced to the Graduate College at Princeton University, where a number of variants were developed.[11] The werewolf theme was also incorporated in the French adaption of Mafia, The Werewolves of Millers Hollow.

In its simplest form, Mafia is played by two teams: the mafia and the innocents. Live games require a moderator who does not participate as a player, and identities are assigned by handing out cards. At the start of the game, every mafioso is given the identities of their teammates, whereas the innocents only receive the number of mafioso in the game, and do not know which players are mafia and which are innocents.

There are two phases: night and day. At night, certain players secretly perform special actions; during day, players discuss and vote to "lynch", or eliminate, one player. These phases alternate with each other until all mafiosi have been eliminated or until the mafia outnumbers the innocents.

Some players may be given roles with special abilities. Common special roles include:

detective — an innocent who may learn the team of one player every night;
doctor — an innocent who may protect a player from being killed every night;
barman — a mafioso who may cancel the effect of another role's ability every night
Andrew Plotkin recommends having exactly two mafiosi, whereas the original Davidoff rules suggest a third of the players (rounding to the nearest whole number) be mafiosi. Davidoff's original game does not include roles with special abilities. In his rules for "Werewolf", Plotkin recommends that the first phase be day and that there be an odd number of players. These specifications prevent players from being killed before the first day and in most scenarios ensure that the game will end dramatically on a lynching rather than with an anticlimactic murder.

The first game of this kind I played was a game card. 10 players get dealt one single card. Among the cards dealt there is an Ace and a King.
The player that draws the King is the "Detective" and the player that draws the Ace becomes the "Assassin". The rest of the players are "Targets".

The Assassin needs to eliminate the Targets before he is caught by the Detective. He does that by looking at a Target and winking at them trying to not been seen or caught.

The Assassin wins the game by avoiding capture and killing every Target. The Detective wins the game by capturing the Assassin.

It's a great fun game... And I am considering running a couple of games here...

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