Mafia (party game)

Mafia, also known as Werewolf, is a social deduction game created in 1986 by Dmitry Davidoff, then a psychology student at Moscow State University. The game models a conflict between two groups: an informed minority (the mafiosi or the werewolves) and an uninformed majority (the villagers). 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: first, a night-phase, during which those with night-killing-powers may covertly kill other players, and second, a day-phase, in which all surviving players debate and vote to eliminate a suspect. The game continues until a faction achieves its win condition; for the village, this usually means eliminating the evil minority, while for the minority, this usually means reaching numerical parity with the village and eliminating any rival evil groups.

History

Dimitry Davidoff (Russian: Дми́трий Давы́дов, Dmitry Davydov) is generally acknowledged as the game's creator. He dates the first game of Mafia to spring 1987 at the Psychology Department of Moscow State University, from where it spread to the classrooms, dorms, and summer camps. Davidoff says that he brought Mafia into the Psychology department classrooms for research and it spread (as a meme) from there to dormitories and likely over next summer, through student summer camps. He credits this game-based methodology to pioneering 1920s psychologist Lev Vygotsky and the Turing test. He developed the game to combine psychology research with his duties teaching high school students.