Mafia is usually a boring game that no one really knows how to play. I must have played it maybe two times in my entire life before coming to Cornell Mafia Club — probably at sleep-away camp once when the counselor didn’t know what else to do with us.
The rules of Mafia appear simple on paper. Everyone sits in a circle and the “mafia” has to try to try to eliminate each player from the game, while the sheriff, doctor and other townspeople need to figure out who the mafia is, and vote them out.
This club at Cornell takes the game to the next level. The intensity and strategy involved is honestly very surprising, and it tends to get increasingly tense with every passing stage. Rather than the usual two to three basic roles, Mafia Club has 22 in their “Basic” version of the game. Beyond Basic, there is Standard, Standard+ and Standard Deluxe. The Standard Deluxe version has 123 unique roles.
In a 10 to 15 person game, a logical assortment of these roles are randomly given to each player. There are specific mafia-sided, town-sided and third party roles that add crazy complexity to this game. It's impossible to keep track of all these roles and to know what they do, so luckily they are all listed with explanations on the Cornell Mafia Club website.
The meetings are held on Friday nights on the ground floor of William Keeton House, next to the dining hall. I have a few friends who had gone to Mafia Club before, so I decided to go to a few meetings when it was 2° outside.
A competitive game with moving parts can last several hours, so when there are multiple games going on at once I usually stray away from the super sweaty group. It’s just not as fun when everyone is too tapped in and you can’t get away with a bit of nonsense. To give readers a better picture of what Mafia Club is like, I’ll go through my experience at the last meeting I attended.
To start, we sit around a table and kill time while the moderator sets up the game. Once everyone is assigned their roles, the game begins for the night. My role was Amnesiac, a third party role that can see who dies each night, and take over one of the dead roles if I so choose. Third party roles are always more fun.
This role offered me a safety net: a “one-shot bulletproof,” that would allow me to stay alive for at least the first round. Within this role, I could choose to join the town-side or mafia-side at some point, which added another good layer of interest.
I attend with a group of friends, so naturally, we all pray on each other's downfall. Much of the early voting blocks just consisted of us trying to get each other out. Once I had survived the first couple rounds, my position was a bit safer.
At this point, another mafia-sided role was then voted out of the game, meaning there was only one mafia left. I was being heavily pressured to reveal my role, as everyone else had revealed theirs. I considered using a fake role, but someone else had already claimed it, so using it could get me immediately voted out.
My biggest opposition, who claimed to be some sort of X-Shot Vigilante, said they would “kill” me at the next meeting if I didn’t reveal my role. They started to really get on my nerves because my plan was to stay discreet until essentially the last round, but there wasn’t much I could do. I revealed that I was the Amnesiac, and said that I would be happy to join the town since they had a number advantage and would probably win anyway — my only true interest was winning.
Yes, if I had actually joined the Town, I probably could have easily won the game. But that route is boring, and quite honestly a load of b.s. The best way to play this game is to make the most fun out of it and cause the most chaos. Of course, when you get the win, it feels even better.
When the moderator asked me if I wanted to choose another role, as per the Amnesiac’s ability, I chose Accuser, which was the first mafia role that died. The accuser role wasn’t really that powerful at this point, but as a member of the mafia I would collectively choose someone to kill each night with the other mafias.
As I lifted my head that night to choose a victim, I was surprised to see that my biggest opposition, and someone who had been one of the biggest town-sided voices all game, was the mafia. I felt a bit played, but there was business to be done. We chose a victim, and they got murked.
My alibi role was the Gossiper, which was the role of one of my friends who had died earlier. Everyone wanted me to choose this role, because it can see if two people are on the same side, and gives good intel. I chose two town-sided people, and said they were on different teams to get the pot stirring.
Eventually, after much discussion, we were successful in convincing the town to vote one of them out. They were voted out, which should have mathematically allowed us to win, but one of the townies was the final player — meaning that even though the mafia won by numbers, the town actually won. I did everything right, but still got screwed in the end.
If you’ve read this far, you will have realized the game is incredibly complicated and involves multiple layers of strategy. If you’re looking for something different to do on a Friday night, I highly recommend it.
Yianni Metis is a sophomore in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. He can be reached at jpm395@cornell.edu.
