Mafia (party game)

Mafia

Players making accusations in a game of Mafia
Designer(s)	Dmitry Davidoff
Players	At least 6 for classic, dethy is played with 5.
Skill(s) required	Strategic thought Team play Social skills Roleplay

Mafia (Russian: Ма́фия [ˈmaːfja]), also known as Werewolf, is a party game created by Dmitry Davidoff in 1986 modelling a conflict between an informed minority, the , 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: night, during which the mafia may covertly "murder" an innocent, and day, in which surviving players debate the identities of the mafia and vote to eliminate a suspect. Play continues until all of the mafia have been eliminated or until the mafia outnumbers the innocents.

Dmitry Davidoff (Russian: Дми́трий Давы́дов, Dmitry Davydov) 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. The game became popular in other Soviet colleges and schools and in the 1990s it began to be played in other parts of Europe and then the United States. By the mid 1990s a version of the game became a Latvian television series (with a parliamentary setting, and played by Latvian celebrities).

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. The werewolf theme was also incorporated in the French adaption of Mafia, The Werewolves of Millers Hollow.