Mafia
A parlour game of liars, simulated whole — watch the table argue itself to death, or take a seat at it.
- 9–16 seats
- 20 roles
- English & Russian
- Seeded and shareable
Rules as played in Deerfield Beach, FL. The full rules live inside the game, on the House panel. Сыграть по-русски →
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Play a hand and this becomes a code you can send. Every table is one string; whoever types it sits down to the same game you did.
The table runs itself as theatre. Slow it down, skip ahead, or lift the veil and watch the night play out in the open — threads, shields and the one flash that lands on the kill.
Take a seat and you see only what your role can legally see. Speak, nominate, put your hand up, do your night work — and at the end the game grades how well you read the room.
Mafia is the oldest AI problem there is, played by people: an organized minority against a disorganized majority. The family is few, but it meets at night, votes as a bloc, and never wastes a day; the town has the numbers and spends them arguing. The first version of this experiment proved the interesting half — that you can build the drama, not just the arithmetic. This is the second build: same thesis, bigger theatre, and a deck deep enough that the table produces twists the first version couldn't.
It opens on a choice of tables. Official Mafia is the ten-seat tournament layout — two mafiosi and their Don, a sheriff, six citizens, nothing exotic. Street Mafia is sixteen seats with the optional deck switched on, the way the game actually gets played in courtyards. Custom is anything from nine to sixteen seats with any mix you can defend. The presets follow a fixed distribution table in which the Don is counted separately from his soldiers — a deliberate break from the old one-mafioso-per-five-seats formula — and whichever table you pick, the full manifest of roles in play is announced at the start and stays in reach for the whole game.
On top of the house deck — Don, sheriff, doctor, butterfly, mailman, serial killer — sit a dozen optional roles, each built to add intrigue without tipping the three-way balance. The town gains a barman who cancels a night action with a poured drink, a journalist who learns whether two players share a team, a bodyguard who dies in someone else's place, an insomniac who wakes knowing she was visited, a mayor whose revealed vote counts double, and a gravedigger who reads exact roles off the dead. The family gains a framer who makes the innocent read black to the sheriff, a silencer who tapes a mouth shut for a day, and an understudy who reads red until the first mafioso falls. And three answer to nobody: a jester who wins only by getting himself voted out, an executioner with a private target, and a phantom who haunts the table from the grave.
The rest is presentation with intent. It opens on a door rather than a page: one tap and the room takes the whole screen, browser chrome included, and one tap on the way out gives the page back exactly as it was found. The seats stand around the perimeter of the room rather than orbiting a circle, which is how sixteen of them fit on a phone without anyone shrinking to a dot. Your card arrives as a reveal themed to what you drew. And everything anyone says exists in English and in Russian, written as table speech rather than as a translated interface.
Watch it and it plays like theatre. Take a seat and it stops being funny, because the straight-faced player steering the vote your way might be family, might be town losing patience — or might be a jester who wants the rope. Nothing was thrown away, either: the version this replaced is archived and still playable.
Original, not a port
Everything else in the Lab is an old build dragged back to life. This one was written here, to a specific house set played in Deerfield Beach — the rotating first speaker, the Don hunting the sheriff, the butterfly and the mailman.
The rulebook is the law
A written rulebook is amended before the code is, and every conformance test cites the section it is testing. Where the code and the rulebook disagree, the code is the bug — which is why the deck could grow by a dozen roles without the balance falling over.
Deterministic to the seed
One seeded generator drives the deal, every decision and every tie-break, and no clock or random call exists anywhere in the engine. A game is completely described by its seed and its roster, so a shared link is the same game, hand for hand.
This is the second build of an original Lab game, not a port of anything. The rules stay faithful to a specific house set played in Deerfield Beach — the rotating first speaker, the Don hunting the sheriff, the butterfly and the mailman — now extended with three preset tables, a Don counted apart from his soldiers, and a dozen optional roles, every one written into the rulebook before it was written into code. The first version was not replaced quietly: the original is archived and playable alongside this one.