Mafia / Werewolf Rules

Mafia (also widely known as Werewolf) is a social deduction game with no board and almost no components beyond a stack of role cards — the entire game is a structured conversation where half the table is lying by design and the other half is trying to catch them at it.

Assigning secret roles

Before play begins, every player is secretly and randomly assigned a role, usually via a dealt card kept hidden from everyone else. A small minority of players become the mafia (or werewolves); everyone else is an ordinary villager, unless the group is using additional special roles.

The night phase

The game alternates between two phases. During "night," everyone closes their eyes except when called on. A moderator (or an app, in digital versions) calls on the mafia to secretly open their eyes and silently agree on one villager to eliminate; special roles, if included, are called on in turn to take their own private night action.

The day phase

Once night actions are resolved, "day" begins: the moderator announces who was eliminated overnight, and every surviving player discusses openly, sharing suspicions, accusations, and alibis in whatever conversational form the group prefers. The day phase ends with an open vote, and whoever receives the most votes is eliminated from the game (and, at most tables, their role is revealed to everyone once they're out).

Common special roles

Beyond plain villagers and mafia, most groups add a handful of special roles to sharpen the deduction: a detective (or seer) who secretly investigates one player each night and privately learns whether they're mafia or not, and a doctor who secretly protects one player each night from that night's mafia elimination, which can save a targeted player if the doctor happens to guess correctly. Larger groups sometimes add further roles (a role that can act only once, a role that dies but takes someone with them), but detective and doctor are close to universal across versions of the game.

Winning

Villagers win the moment every mafia player has been eliminated, whether through night actions gone wrong for the mafia or, more commonly, through the day phase's votes correctly identifying them. The mafia wins the moment their numbers equal or outnumber the remaining villagers, since at that point they can no longer be out-voted even with perfect villager coordination.

Strategy: the asymmetry that drives everything

The entire tension of the game comes from an information asymmetry that never resets: the mafia know exactly who their teammates are and can coordinate secretly, while villagers know nothing for certain and have to build a case purely from day-phase behavior — hesitation, inconsistent stories, oddly defensive reactions to accusations. A detective's secretly gained information is extremely valuable specifically because it's the only reliable, non-circumstantial evidence anyone at the table has, which is also exactly why the mafia often prioritizes eliminating a suspected detective overnight before that information can be shared with the group.

Origins: invented in 1986 Moscow, later reskinned as Werewolf

Mafia was created in 1986 by psychology student Dimitry Davidoff at Moscow State University, originally developed as an experimental exercise on group dynamics and majority-versus-minority decision-making before spreading as a genuinely popular party game across the Soviet Union and, later, internationally. The "Werewolf" reskin — replacing mafia with werewolves and villagers with ordinary townsfolk — is a later Western adaptation, popularized in particular by game designer Andrew Plotkin's version released in 1997, and it's mechanically identical to Mafia beneath the different theme and role names.

The arguments this game actually produces

Whether an eliminated player is allowed to communicate anything at all to the remaining players comes up in nearly every group's first game — the standard rule is a strict, complete silence from eliminated players for the rest of the game, since any hint from someone who knows the mafia's identity (having seen role reveals as they went out) would break the entire information asymmetry the game depends on.

Group size and how it changes the balance

The ratio of mafia to villagers matters enormously to how the game actually plays — too few mafia in a large group makes the villagers' job nearly automatic once a couple of night eliminations happen, while too many mafia relative to villagers can let them reach parity and win before the group has had a real chance to deduce anything. A common guideline is roughly one mafia member for every four to five total players, adjusted up slightly if special roles like the detective are giving villagers extra help.

Questions that come up mid-game

Can the mafia choose not to eliminate anyone on a given night? Yes, at most tables — the mafia can pass on a night kill if they genuinely believe it serves their strategy, though this is rare in practice since it gives villagers no clue at all rather than a body to reason about.

What happens if the day-phase vote ends in an exact tie between two players? Conventions vary — some groups eliminate both tied players, some hold a runoff revote between just the two of them, and some treat a tie as no elimination at all for that day; agreeing on which before the game starts avoids a genuinely common argument at a close vote.