Mafia Nomic

A hybrid of Mafia/Werewolf and Nomic, where instead of just proposing to lynch suspicious players, you can propose to do anything...

Background

Mafia Nomic is a hybrid of Mafia (a secret-identity game also known as Werewolf) and Nomic (a game where players can vote to change the rules during play). Basically, it's normal Mafia except that instead of just voting on one lynch per day, players may put forward anything for voting, with successful proposals changing the mechanics of the game. If the players want a prison, or guns, or wiretaps, or bombs, or a cure for lycanthropy, they just have to define how that would work, and vote on it.

It's probably not that original an idea, but this ruleset draws from a themed round of the online Nomic game of BlogNomic in 2007, which started with a bare-bones Werewolf ruleset, and expanded to include professions, firearms, silver bullets, gaol cells, herbal poisons, written wills and ghostly hauntings. It's written up here. Given that it was a slow online game, there was a lot of emphasis on getting the rules worded exactly right - in a real-life conversational game, the narrator can make snap judgments and clarifications.

Although it's not been tested in a face-to-face environment, it seems like a good way to play a themed game of Mafia without worrying in advance about balance, and to give everyone a chance to be creative. If you want to run a zombie or pirate or cylon variant, you can just get it started with a blank ruleset and encourage players to come up with ideas, making up the special roles as you go along.

Narrator instructions

As narrator, it's your job to keep the game going, to make a note of all rule additions and alteration, to veto any that would be unfair, and to make snap judgments for "realism", when a newly added rule turns out to be ambiguous.

At the very start of the game, you and the other players should pick a theme. A theme should consist of a clear setting (eg. "a pirate ship"), a role which the "mafia" players would take (some sort of identity which could feasibly be kept secret, eg. "spy for the British Navy"), and a thematic way in which the mafia can kill people anonymously ("using given information, the Navy intercept the ship at a port, and take a prisoner"). If it fits the theme, you can also rename the "day" and "night" phases (to "at sea" and "shore leave"). For the purposes of explaining the rules, we'll use the term "mafia" to refer to the players who have a secret role.

After announcing the theme, you should secretly assign the mafia role to roughly a quarter of the players, rounding up or down. (It can be better if the players don't know the exact number of mafia they're up against.) Hand out pre-written cards, or poker cards with one suit representing mafia, or just use slips of paper.

The game will proceed through a number of day and night phases, starting with day.

Day phase

During the day phase, the players are free to put forward proposals. A proposal should either change the rules of the game, change the current state of the game, or do both. (So a normal-Mafia lynch proposal is essentially a simple gamestate proposal of "I propose that we kill Bob".) Players are allowed three enacted proposals per day (they can have any number of failed ones), and the Night Phase only begins after three proposals have been accepted.

Proposals can either add new rules, or change the existing ones. Some examples might be:-

"I propose that we have a chair in the corner as the "brig", which we can send a single player to instead of killing them. We have to do that by a proposal. They're dead for all intents and purposes while they're there, but we can make another proposal to bring them back out again if we want."

"One randomly selected player will become the Psychic. They'll be tapped on the shoulder by the narrator, tonight, so we won't know who it is. During each day, the Psychic can choose to ask up to three yes-or-no questions to dead players."

"Cylons can't target specific humans, only the areas that they live and work in. At night, the cylons point to a chair. At the end of the day, that chair explodes, killing whoever is sitting there. Players can move around during the day, but must end the day sitting on a chair."

"There's a gun; we'll vote on who gets to start with it. During the day, the player with the gun can shoot any player by simply pointing at them and shouting 'bang!'. It kills them instantly. They only get two bullets."

"Dead players become zombies. They don't close their eyes at night, and must stand behind their chair. They can't talk. Each night, they may step one chair left or right around the circle. Anybody who wakes up with three or more zombies behind them is killed."

When somebody makes a proposal, wait to see if the other players have any questions about how it works ("So does that mean if we put the last Navy spy in the brig, the game ends?") - the player making the proposal can clarify the wording if they need to. Once that's done, take a quick raised-hand vote to see who's in favour of the proposal, and who's against it. (Dead players can't vote!) If there are more players in favour than against, then the proposal is enacted - if it's a change to the gamestate, then that change is made. If it's a new rule, that rule is now immediately in force, and the narrator writes it down.

The narrator should veto any proposal which seems blatantly unfair to the mafia players ("I propose an infection scanner that automatically reveals the identities of all zombie-infected players! All those in favour?"), or at least insist on modifications to keep it balanced ("Okay, you can have a scanner, but it only scans one person each day, and the infected can choose to destroy it instead of killing someone, at night.")

Equally importantly, the narrator can also put forward small proposals on the mafia's behalf, if an existing rule is turning out to be too powerful and needs to be weakened, or if an obvious mafia mechanic is suggesting itself. Narrator proposals do not count towards the three-per-day limit.

Night phase

This is the same as normal Mafia. Start the night phase by telling the players that it is now night, and that everyone must sleep (or go into stasis, or attend evening prayer, or whatever fits your theme). Everyone must close their eyes. Then tell the mafia players to open their eyes, silently pick a target, and close their eyes again.

Night ends, and the selected target is killed. A new day begins.

Game end

The game ends, as for normal Mafia, when the mafia players equal or outnumber the non-mafia players, or when the mafia have all been killed.

Of course, alternate victory conditions may be proposed before then.

Useful mechanics

Items: If your players end up proposing rules that create items which players can carry, it's good to have some default behaviours for those items. We'd suggest: an item can only be carried by one person, and that person can hand it on to anybody they like, at any time. If a person carrying an item dies, the item is placed on the floor - anyone can grab it (even a mafia player, at night, although normal mafia deaths don't occur until sunrise), but it's likely that a proposal will be made to assign it a new owner.

Props: If you know what your theme's going to be, bring along a few physical props and dump them in the middle of the room, to see if anyone has any ideas for them. (If you're not using props, just write words on cards to keep track of who's holding the Cylon Detector or the Key to the Dungeon.)

Transferable roles: You might like to decide that publicly-known roles (like "President" or "Postman") are transferable between players; such players can choose to retire and pass their role on to someone else, during the day phase, and are automatically reassigned by popular vote if the role-carrier dies.