Live Action Mafia

Live Action Mafia, or Real-Time Mafia, is essentially the same game, but spread out over several real-world days. It works best at camps/conventions etc. where everyone is living in close proximity, though theoretically it could be played across an entire neighborhood or city. The Mafia sneak out at night and mark their kills with a red X on a piece of paper attached to each player's door. Jake Eakle (jellvid@gmail.kom (k for spam disuasion)) describes the rules of the first (to his knowledge) game of Live Action Mafia ever below. If anyone else plays or has played Live Action Mafia, please post similar reports in this space.

The First Live Action Mafia Game

I was at a programming camp at Stanford over the summer of 2005, sharing a dorm with about forty other programming and geometry students. We played Mafia quite a bit during the first week, twice or three times a night. After a week, this crazy ADD kid named Dennis came up with one of the awesomest ideas ever: real-time Mafia. Each dorm room had a piece of paper with the names of its residents taped to the door. During the night, the mafia would sneak out and put an X on the door of the person they wanted to kill. It would be AWESOME. Everyone loved the idea, and we set about organizing it. We played with the following list of characters:

#	Character	Power
1	God	The moderator
Baddies
#	Character	Power
4	Mafia	Choose one person a night to kill. Put red X on that person's sign. Win if everyone else dead.
4	Werewolf	Choose one person a night to kill. Put green X on that person's sign. Win if everyone else dead.
Townsfolk
#	Character	Power
4	Police	Choose one person to investigate each night. God tells them what character/faction that person is.
1	Hunter	Chooses one person per night to kill. Puts a black X on that person's sign. Wins with the townsfolk.
1	Guardian Angel	Chooses one person per night to protect. If that person would have been killed, a white circle is drawn around the X. Otherwise, no mark is made.
1	Detective	Chooses one person to investigate AND protect. If they would have died, a yellow star is drawn over the X. Otherwise, no mark is made, but they still are shown the identity of the person they chose.
15-20	Villagers	Talk

That's 19 player characters right there, which meant that probably a bit more than half of the players had some special identity. This number worked fairly well, and if I organized another game, i don't think I would change it much. I might even add a couple minor things to make more people feel special.

Okay, now into the nitty gritty of how the game was played. Everyone assembled in the courtyard and God, (an experienced D&D DM who also Godded all our nightly mafia games) passed out cards. We used the face cards from a normal deck of playing cards for the three factions, number cards for villager, and the three one-ofs were assigned in private by God. After everyone got their card, we waited while each person had a little personal conference with God off to one side. During this conference, God told the factions who their teammates were, assigned the three characters to players of his choice (the factions were random), and pretended to talk to the villagers for a bit so you couldn't tell they weren't special. Each faction had a leader, who was entrusted with the marker of that faction's color and who was responsible for telling the name of the chosen person to God before 8 o'clock. A whiteboard with everyone's names on it was set up in a central area for day-time voting purposes. Living players wrote their names by the name of the person they were voting for each day, and the person with the most votes at 8 o'clock was killed. The Mafia and Werewolves did not know who each other were and were trying to kill each other, though presumably they would like to keep each other around for a while to weed out more townsfolk more quickly. The Hunter could kill whomever e wished, but was not required to kill anyone. The X's had to be on doors before 8 in the morning, or the kill did not count.

Believe it or not, the insanity described above was in fact a _really_ fun game. My personal account follows:

Day 1

We wake up to find that Dennis has, during the night, put red X's on _everyone's_ doors. I am slightly disappointed to find that I am a townsfolk. However, as the cards are being handed out, the last four of us in line all accidentally see each others cards. We are all townsfolk. We agree on the spot to form a fourth "faction", sharing information and voting together. Then we get an incredible boon - one of us is the hunter. Now we really are a fourth faction, only slightly less powerful than the werewolves and mafia in that if a specific one of us dies, we have no more power. Also, one of us catches a glimpse of a kid named J.R.'s card. She knows it was a face card, and thinks it was a king. She is all freaked out because she is pretty sure kings were Mafia, and that he saw her see his card, and so she would die right away. Our other order of business is finding out who the guardian angel is as quickly as possible, so we can get em to protect the Hunter, thus preserving our group's power.

Night 1

I am killed by the wolves, for no discernible reason. I realize, though, that this really doesn't matter. I can't vote, but I am still as much a part of the game as anyone. We opt not to kill J.R., because if he dies then he will think Emily (the one who saw his card) is the Hunter, and tell the other Mafia, who will kill her. Besides, we want to keep him alive so we can find out who the rest of the Mafia are.

Day 2

I kinda thought that Jacks were Mafia, so I ask God what the cards had been, and without thinking why I was asking, he told me that kings were cops. Now we knew another good person, and one with still more power! We grab J.R. and take him to my room where we explain the situation. He doesn't tell us the names of the other cops yet, cause he's not entirely sure he can trust us.

Night 2;

We go on a hunch and kill someone we think is mafia.

Day 3

A number of groups of four have been seen in each other's company. We think we know who two of the wolves are. A girl has been saying she is the guardian angel, so we try to use J.R. find out if she is, but he says his team won't listen to him or something.

After this, i don't remember exact days, but the sequence of events was something like this

I eavesdrop on the two people we think are wolves, and hear them saying to 'Go get John and Katy.' We know the whole faction! We devise the following test for the guardian angel - we have the hunter kill her, and tell her to protect herself. That way, if she's lying, she's dead, and if she's not, we have a new addition to our group. She isn't lying, and we have her start protecting the Hunter. If we could just find the Detective and have em protect the angel, we'd be pretty well safeguarded. Then we start getting suspicious of J.R. He hasn't really been helping us as much as he should be. We corner him in a room, shut the door, and tell him we'll kill him if he doesn't tell us who the other cops are. He gives us two names. I tell him there are four cops, and he freezes for a sec, then shrugs and turns himself in - he was Mafia. But we don't just stop there. We can still use him. We choose one of the people he named and tell him that if that person doesn't die, we'll kill him. Sure enough, that person was Mafia too, and apparently won't be persuaded to sacrifice himself, so we kill J.R. An interesting bit of strategy went in to deciding who to have the guardian angel protect that night - obviously, the mafia now know the hunter and want to kill him, but they also know that the guardian angel will be protecting the hunter, so they might try to kill her, but then they might think we're trying to fake them out by having her protect herself, etc. etc. I don't actually remember what we chose, but it wound up working. Then, one of the people we thought were werewolves dies. To the werewolves. We were wrong, and that group was the cops. After the fifth day, people did start getting kinda bored, and by the end no one really cared anymore and it all fell apart with no clear winner. HOWEVER, for those four to five days it was going strong, it was some of the most intense fun I've ever had. People were talking Mafia pretty much nonstop all throughout the day, and the twists and turns my group took were by no means abnormal - everyone was having that much fun. It was very, very good times. Oh, one other amusing anecdote from the game - one of the real cops was so worried at one point that she was going to die that she left her door open with a digital video camera recording out it all night long. She didn't catch anyone in the act, and didn't even die that night, but the sheer dedication that went into that is impressive in itsef.