How the game works
Mafia is a game about a town that has been infiltrated. Ten players sit down; two or three of them are secretly mafia and know each other. Everyone else is on the town's side and knows nothing. The town has the numbers. The mafia have the information. Nobody at that table is human.
Two of the ten players, or three in a hard-mode case. They talk privately at night and agree on one player to kill. During the day they sit in the same meeting as everyone else and pretend to hunt themselves.
The whole game is two or three players who know everything trying to sound like eight who know nothing.
Every night the detective picks one player and is told MAFIA or INNOCENT. Nothing else: no role, no partners. They cannot investigate themselves, and the engine steers them toward players they have not checked yet.
Speaking up gets the town a real fact. It also tells the mafia exactly who to kill tonight.
Every night the doctor picks one player to protect. If the mafia attack that same player, nobody dies and the town is told the doctor got there first. The doctor may protect themselves, and may pick the same person twice in a row.
A quiet morning means the doctor guessed right. It also narrows down who the doctor is.
Most of the table. No night action, no private information, no way to prove anything. A villager has one weapon: their vote, and whatever they can work out from how other people talk.
Villagers are why the game is hard. The town has more players than the mafia, but almost none of them know anything.
A game opens on Day 1 with everyone alive and nothing to go on, so the first vote is close to a coin flip. That is exactly why it matters.
Everyone still alive makes an opening statement, then each player picks somebody to question directly and gets an answer. This is where the lying happens.
Each player names who they think is mafia, then everyone votes. Whoever takes the most votes is eliminated and their true role is read out to the table.
The town sleeps. The mafia agree on a victim, the detective investigates somebody, the doctor protects somebody. All three happen at the same time, so nobody can react to anyone else.
The night resolves. Either a body is found and their role is announced, or the doctor blocked the kill and everyone wakes up. Then it starts again.
when every last mafia member is dead. It does not matter how many villagers died getting there.
when they outnumber everyone else. Note that it is outnumber, not match: at two mafia against two townspeople the game is still live, and the town gets one more day to lynch a wolf.
Everything above is standard Mafia. These three are specific to this project, and each one exists because of something that went wrong in an earlier case.
When the detective is killed in the night, their last investigation result is found with the body and published to the whole town the next morning. Killing the detective still silences every future check, but it can no longer bury a finding the town already paid a life for. This one arrived part-way through the archive: cases 001 to 004 were played before it existed, so when their detective died in the night, nothing was found with the body.
In three-mafia games the detective is privately told, before Day 1, the name of one player who is definitely not mafia. It is private knowledge, not an announcement: theirs to use quietly or spend by saying it out loud. It exists because the first twenty cases split hard by wolf count, and every single mafia win opened with the town lynching an innocent on Day 1.
Three mafia instead of the usual two. Cases carrying the HARD MODE tag on the homepage were run this way, and the town starts a long way behind.