For this week’s critical play, I chose to play Mafia. Mafia is a social deduction game and it was created by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986. Its target audience is anyone from preteens to adults. This is because the game requires bluffing and strategic thinking, so it might not be too fun for children who do not understand these concepts. Moreover, the game is catered to people who enjoy social deduction, role-playing, and group games, since the game creates a circle of magic around the players; they become a town where everyone becomes a different character and they do not exit the circle they die or the game finishes. It is excellent for playing in a variety of settings including but not limited to classrooms and team building. And it should be played by at least 6 people, but the more the merrier! Because then there can be more rounds and more investigation.
Due to the high volume of people who play this game across the US and beyond, this game has many variations. In the variation that I played, there were four types of people: mafia, villager, investigator, and doctor. The roles are as follows:
- Moderator: Controls the flow of the game.
- Mafia: Work together to kill everyone who is innocent.
- Villagers: Innocent. Do not have any special abilities. Try to find and eliminate the Mafia.
- Detective: Innocent. Are able to check whether or not someone is Mafia. Try to find and eliminate the Mafia.
- Doctor: Innocent. Are able to save someone from being killed by the Mafia. Try to find and eliminate the Mafia.
The game flow consists of several rounds, in which there is night and day.
The night phase consists of the following steps:
- Everybody closes their eyes.
- Mafia wake up, silently agree on one person to eliminate, and go back to sleep.
- Doctor wakes up and points to someone to save.
- Detective wakes up and points to someone to investigate; the moderator gives a thumbs-up/down.
In turn, the day phase consists of the following steps:
- Everyone opens their eyes. The moderator announces who died, or who was saved from dying.
- Players discuss who they think the mafia is.
- Players vote on one person to eliminate. That person is out, and their role is revealed.
The game repeats night and day phases until one of the following takes place:
- Mafia is eliminated; Innocent people win!
- Mafia outnumber innocent people; Mafia wins.
When I played Mafia, there were 2 mafia, 2 villagers, one detective, and one doctor. I was assigned the role of the detective. On the first night, I investigated someone and found out they were Mafia right away. So as soon as day came, I subtly tried to steer the group toward voting her out, but ironically, my own confidence and volume worked against me. People assumed I was deflecting, and I got voted out immediately. It was very annoying and made me think about the different advantages and disadvantages that extraversion has when playing a game such as this one. After I was eliminated and my role was revealed, the group realized I had been right all along and voted out the Mafia player the next round. After this, the remaining mafia (one player) kept trying to kill the doctor, who kept saving themselves. Thus the group size stayed the same until one villager convinced everyone to vote out the person who was Mafia based on no evidence other than them seeming a bit tense. They were able to vote out the Mafia and thus the innocent people won.
Watching the remaining players strategize based on moments of doubt, the doctor continuously saving themselves, and how people’s personalities influenced their voting decisions made me realize how much social dynamics shape this game. This dynamic of trust, bluffing, and deduction connects directly to my own team’s game — though the mechanics are distinct, the emotional arc is quite similar. Like Mafia, our game is built around deception and social strategy.
Moreover, the camaraderie that forms within the liar or impostor group takes place in both games. In Mafia, the mafia members secretly know each other’s identities and get to share in the thrill of orchestrating eliminations while keeping up their innocent facades. Likewise, in our game, liars wake up together before the round starts and bond over their shared challenge of completing hidden agendas without getting caught. That secret alliance (even if it’s just between two players) creates an “us versus them” dynamic that adds a layer of mischief and teamwork to the game. It’s often just as fun to be a liar as it is to win, because of the shared chaos and the silent laughs exchanged between impostors trying not to break character.
However, while Mafia emphasizes elimination through secret information and deduction in a fictional town setting, our game leans more toward subtle manipulation and storytelling through personal prompts. The deception in our game is more performative — liars must carry out hidden agendas woven into their answers to real, often vulnerable, discussion prompts. Instead of deducing who killed who, players are trying to identify strange patterns or “off vibes” in what should feel like honest, conversational responses.
This creates a very different kind of tension. In Mafia, you’re eliminated by suspicion of what happened while nobody was watching, often quickly and harshly, like what happened to me. In our game, you’re eliminated by a slow build of uncertainty, by how well (or poorly) you can blend in with the group’s emotional or narrative flow. The clues are right under everybody else’s noses, if they are observant enough. One might find themself thinking, “Did they really just say ‘peanut’ three times in a story about their favorite childhood memory?”
The mechanics that the impostors/Mafia are handed in order to win are also very different across these games. For example, in Mafia, they have the advantage that they are able to kill off people in the game, but they have to keep doing so until they outnumber the villagers. In our game, the impostors do not have the power to kill off any of the truth telling individuals, but they only have to survive for a fixed number of rounds. This makes it so that group strategies can vary a lot from game to game as the impostor group is aiming to out-survive the other group.
Another major contrast lies in the emotional terrain. Mafia is structured around a fictional world with clear goals (kill or survive), whereas our game dips into players’ real personalities, preferences, and stories. This opens up both comedic and heartfelt possibilities. It also means players who are naturally more private or reserved might struggle with certain prompts, something we plan to address with categorized prompt decks and optionality.
In sum, playing Mafia helped me realize how powerful role assignment and group psychology can be in shaping a player’s experience. Where Mafia sharpens suspicion and tension through elimination and deduction, our game invites creative misdirection through storytelling and subtle sabotage. Both games thrive on performance and intuition, but ours centers that performance in the players’ real-world selves, turning every round into an improvised act of deception, connection, and reflection.
