In my last post, I talked about my recent travels to Colorado in my longest entry so far, complete with pictures. During my last night there, I taught some new friends a game I learned in college called, "Killers & Villagers", a psychological mystery game that only requires people to play. The first time it was taught to me, we played till three o'clock in the morning. The great thing about this game, is that the more you play it, the more you understand how your friends operate and manipulate one another, which you can use to your advantage in future rounds. It's also a lot of fun to hold "lynching" sessions during the game's "day" period in which you vote on players to eliminate. Below, I will outline the rules for this addictive game and give a brief history of its fascinating development by Russian, Dmitry Davidoff, who dates the first game back to 1986 at the Psychology Department of Moscow University.
Killers & Villagers
Players Needed: 6 or more
Player Types: 2 Killers. The rest are Villagers.
Set up: The game consists of two teams (Killers and Villagers). Both teams work to eliminate the other. Roles are chosen at random by drawing folded, labeled strips of paper out of a hat. Make sure nobody knows what the other players' roles are. Once everyone has gotten their role, fold the paper back, and have the papers collected again and set aside. The first round can now begin.
Elect someone to be the "moderator". This will be the person who dictates the flow of the rounds as described here. Have all players "go to sleep" by putting their heads down and secularly closing their eyes. At this time, the two killers in the game will learn each others identity to better work against the villagers. The moderator will now say: "Will the two killers acknowledge each other". The two killers will lift their heads and seek each other out in the group. Once they know each other, they will put their heads back down to "sleep". This should take no more than five seconds. Players can make tapping noises to help avoid hearing the killers move about, which could ruin the game. After a few seconds, the moderator will say: "Everyones' head should be down...and now, all players wake up." The game now goes into its second phase of "day time".
This time is now spent with players analyzing, questioning, and accusing each other as they try to figure out who the killer is. Players can communicate to one another why they are innocent and who they believe is guilty. Players will call for votes to eliminate who they believe one of the killers is. Once more than half of the players vote for one particular person, that individual is eliminated and is now out of the game. He or she is now a spectator from then on. It is VERY important that spectators, who will now be able to see who the killers are, does not reveal their identities, give hints to still living villagers, or anything that would compromise the remainder of the game.
It should be noted that killers, though they work on the same team, can turn against each other if they feel their own life is threatened and they need to divert the heat elsewhere.
The game cycles back into the night time period, in which the killers will, once again, look at each other, so that any eliminated villagers can know their identities. The game then cycles back into the day period, in which questioning and voting recommence. The process continues in this fashion until one team is eliminated. It will be the duty of those previously killed off, to confirm which side is eliminated first.
(*In regards to the moderator, a individual can play WHILE being a moderator if they know what they are doing. You can also have a person who does NOT play the game, and acts solely as a moderator who has no influence on the game.)
Like I said, the more you play, the more you learn how twisted your friends minds are as they lie, deny, and turn the tide. Seeing what mannerisms your friends adapt as they prove their innocence or lie to your face. I hope you get a chance to try it, as it can keep your party entertained for hours. Enjoy, and please check out my last post, "Colorado Travels" to read all about my time in the Rockies.
Here's some more info about this game, originally titled, "Mafia (party game)" sourced from wikipedia:
Mafia (Russian: Ма́фия, also known as Werewolf) is a party game created in the USSR by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986,[2] modelling a conflict between an informed minority (the mafia) and an uninformed majority (the innocents). 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: "night," during which the mafia may covertly "murder" an innocent, and "day," in which surviving players debate the identities of the mafiosi and vote to eliminate a suspect. Play continues until all of the mafia has been eliminated, or until the mafia outnumbers the innocents.
Dmitry Davidoff (Russian: Дми́трий Давы́дов, Dmitriy Davydov) is generally acknowledged as the game's creator. He dates the first game to spring 1986 at the Psychology Department of Moscow State University, spreading to classrooms, dorms, and summer camps of Moscow University.[3][Note 1] Wired attributes the creation to Davidoff but dates the first game to 1987,[4] with 1986 being the year in which Davidoff was starting the work which would produce Mafia. He developed the game to combine psychology research with his duties teaching high school students.[4] The game became popular in other Soviet colleges and schools and in the 1990s it began to be played in Europe and then the United States. By the mid nineties a version of the game became a Latvian television series (with a parliamentary setting, and played by Latvian celebrities).[5]
Andrew Plotkin gave the rules a werewolf theme in 1997,[6] arguing that the mafia were not that big a cultural reference, and that the werewolf concept fitted the idea of a hidden enemy who looked normal during the daytime.[4] Mafia and a variant called Thing[Note 2] have been played at science fiction writers' workshops since 1998,[7] and have become an integral part of the annual Clarion[8]and Viable Paradise[9] workshops. The Werewolf variant of Mafia became widespread at major tech events, including the Game Developers Conference, ETech, Foo Camps, and South By Southwest.[4] In 1998 the Kaliningrad Higher school of the Internal Affairs Ministry published the methodical textbook Nonverbal communications. Developing role-playing games 'Mafia' and 'Murderer' for a course on Visual psychodiagnostics, to teach various methods of reading body language and nonverbal signals.[10]
In March 2006 Ernest Fedorov was running a Mafia Club in Kiev, using his own patented variation of the rules. The club organizes games, rates players, and awards prizes (including a Sicily trip for their tournament-series champion).[11]
In June 2006, a Rockingham school inquiry was launched after parents complained of the traumatic effects classroom Mafia was having on their fifth-grade children. Davidoff responded to the reports, saying that as a parent who had studied child psychology for 25 years, he felt that the game could "teach kids to distinguish right from wrong", and that the positive message of being honest could overcome the negative effects of an "evil narrator" moderating the game as if it were a scary story.[12]
Mafia was called one of the 50 most historically and culturally significant games published since 1800 by about.com.[13] Although the game can be played with a deck of poker cards or slips of paper, Looney Labs successfully marketed a commercial version of the game as Are You a Werewolf?, which was later followed by Asmodee Editions' Werewolves of Millers Hollow, Mayfair Games' Lupus in Tabula and Bezier Games' Ultimate Werewolf.[citation needed] A Cthulhu Mythos variant (Do You Worship Cthulhu) was published in 2006.[14]
Killers & Villagers
Players Needed: 6 or more
Player Types: 2 Killers. The rest are Villagers.
Set up: The game consists of two teams (Killers and Villagers). Both teams work to eliminate the other. Roles are chosen at random by drawing folded, labeled strips of paper out of a hat. Make sure nobody knows what the other players' roles are. Once everyone has gotten their role, fold the paper back, and have the papers collected again and set aside. The first round can now begin.
Elect someone to be the "moderator". This will be the person who dictates the flow of the rounds as described here. Have all players "go to sleep" by putting their heads down and secularly closing their eyes. At this time, the two killers in the game will learn each others identity to better work against the villagers. The moderator will now say: "Will the two killers acknowledge each other". The two killers will lift their heads and seek each other out in the group. Once they know each other, they will put their heads back down to "sleep". This should take no more than five seconds. Players can make tapping noises to help avoid hearing the killers move about, which could ruin the game. After a few seconds, the moderator will say: "Everyones' head should be down...and now, all players wake up." The game now goes into its second phase of "day time".
This time is now spent with players analyzing, questioning, and accusing each other as they try to figure out who the killer is. Players can communicate to one another why they are innocent and who they believe is guilty. Players will call for votes to eliminate who they believe one of the killers is. Once more than half of the players vote for one particular person, that individual is eliminated and is now out of the game. He or she is now a spectator from then on. It is VERY important that spectators, who will now be able to see who the killers are, does not reveal their identities, give hints to still living villagers, or anything that would compromise the remainder of the game.
It should be noted that killers, though they work on the same team, can turn against each other if they feel their own life is threatened and they need to divert the heat elsewhere.
The game cycles back into the night time period, in which the killers will, once again, look at each other, so that any eliminated villagers can know their identities. The game then cycles back into the day period, in which questioning and voting recommence. The process continues in this fashion until one team is eliminated. It will be the duty of those previously killed off, to confirm which side is eliminated first.
(*In regards to the moderator, a individual can play WHILE being a moderator if they know what they are doing. You can also have a person who does NOT play the game, and acts solely as a moderator who has no influence on the game.)
Like I said, the more you play, the more you learn how twisted your friends minds are as they lie, deny, and turn the tide. Seeing what mannerisms your friends adapt as they prove their innocence or lie to your face. I hope you get a chance to try it, as it can keep your party entertained for hours. Enjoy, and please check out my last post, "Colorado Travels" to read all about my time in the Rockies.
Here's some more info about this game, originally titled, "Mafia (party game)" sourced from wikipedia:
Mafia (Russian: Ма́фия, also known as Werewolf) is a party game created in the USSR by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986,[2] modelling a conflict between an informed minority (the mafia) and an uninformed majority (the innocents). 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: "night," during which the mafia may covertly "murder" an innocent, and "day," in which surviving players debate the identities of the mafiosi and vote to eliminate a suspect. Play continues until all of the mafia has been eliminated, or until the mafia outnumbers the innocents.
Dmitry Davidoff (Russian: Дми́трий Давы́дов, Dmitriy Davydov) is generally acknowledged as the game's creator. He dates the first game to spring 1986 at the Psychology Department of Moscow State University, spreading to classrooms, dorms, and summer camps of Moscow University.[3][Note 1] Wired attributes the creation to Davidoff but dates the first game to 1987,[4] with 1986 being the year in which Davidoff was starting the work which would produce Mafia. He developed the game to combine psychology research with his duties teaching high school students.[4] The game became popular in other Soviet colleges and schools and in the 1990s it began to be played in Europe and then the United States. By the mid nineties a version of the game became a Latvian television series (with a parliamentary setting, and played by Latvian celebrities).[5]
Andrew Plotkin gave the rules a werewolf theme in 1997,[6] arguing that the mafia were not that big a cultural reference, and that the werewolf concept fitted the idea of a hidden enemy who looked normal during the daytime.[4] Mafia and a variant called Thing[Note 2] have been played at science fiction writers' workshops since 1998,[7] and have become an integral part of the annual Clarion[8]and Viable Paradise[9] workshops. The Werewolf variant of Mafia became widespread at major tech events, including the Game Developers Conference, ETech, Foo Camps, and South By Southwest.[4] In 1998 the Kaliningrad Higher school of the Internal Affairs Ministry published the methodical textbook Nonverbal communications. Developing role-playing games 'Mafia' and 'Murderer' for a course on Visual psychodiagnostics, to teach various methods of reading body language and nonverbal signals.[10]
In March 2006 Ernest Fedorov was running a Mafia Club in Kiev, using his own patented variation of the rules. The club organizes games, rates players, and awards prizes (including a Sicily trip for their tournament-series champion).[11]
In June 2006, a Rockingham school inquiry was launched after parents complained of the traumatic effects classroom Mafia was having on their fifth-grade children. Davidoff responded to the reports, saying that as a parent who had studied child psychology for 25 years, he felt that the game could "teach kids to distinguish right from wrong", and that the positive message of being honest could overcome the negative effects of an "evil narrator" moderating the game as if it were a scary story.[12]
Mafia was called one of the 50 most historically and culturally significant games published since 1800 by about.com.[13] Although the game can be played with a deck of poker cards or slips of paper, Looney Labs successfully marketed a commercial version of the game as Are You a Werewolf?, which was later followed by Asmodee Editions' Werewolves of Millers Hollow, Mayfair Games' Lupus in Tabula and Bezier Games' Ultimate Werewolf.[citation needed] A Cthulhu Mythos variant (Do You Worship Cthulhu) was published in 2006.[14]
