Would anyone be interested...

In a little forum game involving backstabbing, gossip, lynch mobs, and *gasp* murder?

There’s a game I used to play/moderate that I thought this group might enjoy. It requires a minimum of 15 people and is played entirely on the message board (though sometimes people choose to do some behind the scenes talking via AIM or email). It’s called Mafia.

The basic idea is that you get a group of players and assign them roles. Most people that play will be “townspeople” or “townies”. A smaller group of people are named as the “mafia.” There are three special roles; in the townies group, there is the Sheriff and the Doctor. In the Mafia group, there is the Godfather (the Godfather is always called the Godfather, even if the Godfather is a woman). More on these roles in a sec.

The game is played on a cycle of days. In the morning of each day, the townies awake to find that one of their own has been murdered by the mafia. They then have the rest of the day to form a lynch mob and kill one of the mafia, and so on until one side is completely wiped out. Here’s the catch; the townies have no idea who is Mafia. They must use clues placed at the scene of the crime, along with deductive reasoning and their own interrogation techniques, to determine their killers. It’s therefore quite likely that they will lynch one of their own O_O. The lynching is done through voting, and the mafia can vote too. The mafia has the advantage of knowing who their fellow mafiaosas are, but the disadvantage of smaller numbers.

Now onto those special roles I mentioned earlier. The Doctor is able to select one player each evening after the lynching to be “saved,” and inform the moderator via PM. Should the mafia decide to murder that person in the night, the person would survive the attempt. The Doctor can choose anyone to save, including him/her self. There’s always the risk that the doctor will choose to “save” a mafiosa. The Sheriff is able to select one player each evening after the lynching to identify. The Sheriff would send a pm to the moderator asking the role of another player. The moderator would then respond with either “mafia” or “not mafia.” This ability cannot be used to id the doctor. There is one more exception…The Godfather. The Godfather is in charge of sending the moderator a PM stating which townie will die in the night. The Godfather is also immune from a Sheriff ID.

Usually there is an elaborate scenario surrounding the game. For example, past games I’ve done have been a Hogwarts mafia which pitted regular students vs. jr. death eaters, a Matrix mafia, an Ender’s Game mafia…if we were interested in playing we could do an EQ mafia, or pick another universe.

Anyway, I just thought I would run it by you guys. This game can be a lot of fun. That’s really just a basic outline of how the game works; if we want to play a round here, we can tweak it to fit the TAC environment a bit better and whatnot.