Rival Mafia: a mafia player that may only win after all other rival Mafia City groups are eliminated.

The Game of Mafia

Introduction
Mafia is an 8+ player game that takes about a half hour. It has no board so it's perfect for a large party (especially late at night when people have been drinking) because the players can be all over the room.

The basic concept is that members of the dreaded mafia have infiltrated our community and we, as concerned citizens, need to root them out. So every day we hold a town meeting and lynch someone we suspect of being a member of the mafia (it's not as bad as it seems: we vote first). Then, every "night" the mafia secretly meet and pick a townsperson to kill; the townspeople learn about it in the morning. There is a also an undercover cop floating around somewhere who can help the townspeople.

At the end of the game when there are only mafia and two townspeople left the remaining townspeople must shake hands. The problem is that they don't know who is mafia and who is innocent and the mafia will try to appear as innocent as they can.

If "mafia vs. townspeople" doesn't suit your taste (perhaps you have relatives in organized crime) you can change the theme to be "werewolves vs. townspeople" where the undercover cop is a psychic. The rules work exactly the same either way.

This page describes how to play it at a party; if you'd like to play it on a computer (afterall, I've heard we are in the computer age) check out Expose Mafia. I haven't tried it but it looks pretty cool.

Set Up
Take a deck of ordinary cards and pull out the two black queens and a red king. Add to this a as many non-face cards as are needed to equal the number of people playing. Shuffle the cards carefully so that no one has any hint which cards are which. For extra security, I generally put a card (e.g. a joker) face up on the bottom of the deck to hide the value of the bottom card.

Give each person a card, Mafia Online Game, being very careful that no one sees what anyone else gets. If someone sees, collect the cards, reshuffle and redeal; it's important that it be secret.

The players with the queens are the mafia (werewolves), the player with the king is the cop (psychic) and everyone else is a townsperson (also known as an innocent bystander). Be sure to explain this to everyone several times -- there is nothing worse than having a mafia ask in a loud voice "what does the queen mean again?"