[2] The game models a conflict between two groups: an informed minority (the mafiosi or the werewolves) and an uninformed majority (the villagers).

[4] He developed the game to combine psychology research with his duties teaching high school students.

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 reading body language and nonverbal signals.

[12] Both The Grey Labyrinth[13] and sister site MafiaScum[14] claim that this was the first game of Mafia run on a forum board.

In March 2006 Ernest Fedorov was running a Mafia Club in Kyiv, 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).

[15] 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.

[1] In his rules for "Werewolf", Plotkin recommends that the first phase be night and that there be an odd number of players (including the moderator).

Early treatment of the game concentrated on simulation,[19] while more recent studies have tried to derive closed-form equilibrium solutions for perfect play.

In 2006, the computer scientists Braverman, Etesami and Mossel proved that without detectives and with perfect players the randomized strategy is optimal for both citizens and mafia.

[Note 3] In 2008, Erlin Yao derived specific analytical bounds for the mafia's win probability when there are no detectives.

In particular, when the number of mafiosi is fixed and an odd player is added to the game (and ties are resolved by coin flips), the mafia-winning chance do not drop but rise by a factor of approx.

In live (or videoconference[23]) real-time play, the innocents typically win more often than game theory suggests.

[27] These additional roles are named differently in the many versions of Mafia, for thematic flavor, or historical reasons.

[28] What follows is a general list of role types found in Mafia variants; since the specific names vary by milieu it must be non-exhaustive.

Common alternative themes restyle the mafia as werewolves, cultists, assassins, or witches, with other roles being renamed appropriately.

Davidoff's original 'Mafia' allowed multiple day-time executions (per day), each needing only a plurality to action.

[4] The special case of one mafioso and one innocent remaining can be decided randomly[54] or be ruled a Mafia win—this is more usual in live play.

This can be achieved in the following ways: In some online versions of the game, a particular player (the Godfather or a designated mafioso) must send in the kill.

Attributes were originally derived from roles that could apply to both Mafia and Innocent alignments such as Bulletproof (cannot be killed at night), Mayor (has two votes in the elimination), and Siamese Twins (more commonly known as Siblings or Lovers).

[59] Traditional Mafia re-envisioned and heavily modified by the Copenhagen Game Collective to be played in a subway metro.

[62] The game was updated on 6 June 2017, to add a new faction: the Coven, which mainly consists of witches and is similar in function and goal to the more traditional Mafia.

There is no need to gather many people in the same room, so organizing and playing a game of Mafia is faster and more convenient.

A drawback of online play is the lack of direct face-to-face communication, which many consider the most important aspect of Mafia.

[67] The game requires several AI technologies such as multi-agent coordination, intentional reading, and understanding of the theory of mind.

[71] In the 2010 book Family Games: The 100 Best, Lester W. Smith commented that "the secret to the success of Werewolf comes down to human interaction.

From its earliest incarnation in a university classroom in Moscow to the session of The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow I held in my home [...] the fascination is in experiencing the psychology of a justifiably paranoid community trying to rid itself of a hidden evil – and too often learning that they sacrificed an innocent instead.