History of the game

Face-to-Face Mafia has been around for a long time. The Graduate Mafia Brotherhood of Princeton University has some information on the origins of the game, though it is unclear when the fundamentals of the game were put together. This page will deal with Online Mafia as played on mafiascum.net. While it was played in other places (often in other languages) prior to August 2000, we have no evidence of any occurance of the game online with this large a following.

The Grey Labyrinth, a puzzle website, got a discussion forum in 1999. Initially, of course, this forum was entirely focused on puzzles, but with a switch to UBB, things gradually began to take a social turn. mith had been visiting the site since 1996, and started posting in the forums soon after they started. Early 2000 saw the first games, with a RPS tournament and Paladin's first Serial Killer game (really a combination puzzle and game; the Serial Killer killed based on a rule, and players had to determine what that rule was).

mith had learned Face-to-Face Vanilla Mafia with his church youth group in the late 1990's, and one day decided it would run well on the forums. The original thread can still be found here.

The early GL games were often more experimental in nature, with many of the conventions used today developing as things came up. After the first game, roles from the Princeton site or invented by whoever was moderating were used.

Mafia and other games soon began to make up a significant portion of the threads on the GL, and a forum was created specifically for games. A waiting list for moderators was created, mostly to make sure everyone got a turn that wanted one, while controlling the number of games running at a time.

In 2001, mith introduced Mafia to Brunchma.com. It caught on there as well. With the game flourishing on both sites, he decided it was time for a website dedicated to Mafia, and in March 2002, mafiascum.net was created.