A Guide for Reviewers

[Pedro]

This guide, similar to the Guide for Gamerunners, will give a detailed idea of what to look for when reviewing a Mafia design. Hopefully it will encourage new players to review games in our community, and serve as a reference for everyone.

1. First off...

Game reviewing is a malleable process. A review can vary a lot depending on the type of game is being worked on, what are its priorities, and the people involved with it. Thus, this guide aims to be a helpful tool for reviewers more than the definitive way of doing it.

This guide will only take into consideration normal games, without complex roles and untested mechanics. There is no single way to recommend decisions on original ideas; that knowledge is one a reviewer can acquire after gaining experience with simpler games. Make sure this guide will be appropriate for your design before following it.

When reviewing a game, be polite and agreeable. This is a collaborative process, and you should listen and attend to the designer’s wishes when possible.
With that said, if the design has too many problems and the designer is unwilling to fix them, you are allowed to reject it completely.

And finally, don’t be afraid to ask the opinion of your fellow reviewer. More than usually they might see something you missed, and vice-versa.


2. Mafia-to-Town ratio

This is one of the first aspects to be resolved in a review. How many of the roles in the design belong to either alignment? The standard win condition for the Mafia team is that they win if they consist of 50% or more of the living players. To give that team a fair challenge, it’s been common to give it between 20 and 25% of the roster size at the start of the game.

Below is a general rule of thumb for the size of the Mafia team in a game:

• 9~12 players: 2 members
• 13~16 players: 3 members
• 17~20 players: 4 members
• 21~24 players: 5 members
• 25~29 Players: 6 members

Indirectly, you can use the suggestions above to determine the size of the Town team in a game.
Some other factors can affect how many members the teams should have at the start of the game, including the number of third-party roles, and how many Power Roles each alignment has.


3. Balancing Power Roles

This is the most time-consuming part of the review process. Most games will have Power Roles (PRs) in them, in both teams. Making them balanced so that both teams have roughly the same odds of winning the game is the goal of the review.
We already have a good document for the most common PRs, explaining how they work and how powerful they are. You can find the document here. There will be some overlap between the document and this section.

Here’s a series of helpful guidelines for balancing PRs.

• PRs, and counters to them
  The more PRs one of the teams has, the harder it will be for the other team to win. In a well balanced game, most roles from one team will have some sort of counter on the other one.
  Below is a list of common roles and their counters.
  ⠀
  • Universal counters:
    Roleblocker (Town or Mafia), Jailkeeper (usually Town), Switcher (Town) - counters to most roles
    
    
  • Informative counters:
    Ninja (Mafia) - counter to Watcher/Tracker/Voyeur/Motion Detector (Town)
    Godfather (Mafia) - counter to Alignment Cop (Town)
    Goon, or any PR that usually belongs to the other team (Mafia) - counter to Role Cop (Town)
    
    
  • Killing counters:
    Doctor/Bodyguard/Bulletproof (Town) - counters to the factional Night Kill (Mafia) or a Third-party role with killing abilities (Third-party)
    Bulletproof (Mafia) - counter to Vigilante (Town)
    Bulletproof (Town or Mafia) - counter to Paranoid Gun Owner (Town)
    Poison Doctor (Town) - counter to Poisoner (Mafia)
    Firefighter (Town) - counter to Arsonist (Third-party)
    
    Note: The counters to killing PRs are especially important, because having lot of kill sources can end the game unexpectedly quickly if they all happen at once.
    
    
  • Protective counters:
    Strongman (Mafia) - counter to Doctor (Town)
    
    
  • Roles with no inherent counters:
    Innocent Child (Town)
    Governor (Town)
    Restless Spirit (Town)
    Vanilla Townie (Town)
    Goon (Mafia)
    ⠀
• Powerful informative roles should be used in moderation
  Roles that give definitive information about the design should be treated carefully. A game of Mafia should be played by noticing patterns on player’s behaviors, and deceiving them/exposing their lies, not by simply using PRs to find the solution. Roles such as the Alignment Cop or the Watcher can easily obtain information confirms a player’s alignment, which is unfair to the Mafia team.
  Below are some suggestions to make these roles more challenging.
  ⠀
  • Alignment Cops:
    Give them modifiers that weaken them, like 2 or 3 shots.
    Turn them into Role Cops, and give the Mafia at least one PR that could belong to the Town.
    Give the Mafia a Godfather to counter it.
    
    
  • Watchers:
    Also give them modifiers that weaken them.
    Turn them into Trackers, Voyeurs or Motion Detectors, all less powerful variants of a Watcher.
    Give the Mafia a Ninja to counter it.
• Limit the amount of PRs from the same type
  Even with informative PRs adjusted and countered, it may still be difficult to properly balance the game. A possible reason is that the design might have too many similar roles.
  For example, the game may have too many informative roles, or too many protective roles. This can make the game not fun even if all of these different roles have a counter in place.
  ⠀
  • Too many informative roles:
    The game will get flooded with intel from too many sources, and the game loses its social engineering aspect and becomes a simple logic puzzle.
    
    
  • Too many killing roles:
    The number of living players will decrease too quickly. This can be identified by simulating a worst-case scenario (more on that in the next section).
    
    
  • Too many protective roles:
    This can turn the game frustrating for the Mafia, because it can make them spend multiple Night phases without getting closer to their victory.
• Analyze all possible PR interactions
  PRs tend to have their abilities colliding with each other. This creates scenarios that the designer may not have considered. Try to look out for these issues:
  ⠀
  • The PRs’ actions resulting in many dead players at once:
    Let’s consider a combination of a Vengeful and a pair of Lovers. The Mafia decides to kill the Vengeful during the night, who has decided to kill one of the Lovers.
    This ends with the Vengeful and both Lovers dying, bringing the death toll of a single kill up to three. If there’s a Serial Killer in the design, you can have four deaths at once, leaving the Town at major disadvantage.
• Other possible issues
  ⠀
  • Make sure Doctors have enough restrictions:
    Without any precautions a Doctor can accidentally turn into an unstoppable PR, protecting itself every night, and most likely becoming invincible.
    Doctors should not heal themselves, and/or not target the same person on consecutive nights.
    
    
  • No Jesters:
    This PR runs against the spirit of the game. Never use it.
    
    
  • No Switchers in the Mafia team:
    A Mafia Switcher is too powerful of a PR, throwing the entire game into disarray and should be generally avoided.
    
    
  • No overpowered roles:
    PRs that cannot be voted out, Bulletproofs with infinite Shots, and other PRs that are unlikely to be killed should be eliminated from the design. It’s not fair and not fun.

4. Worst-case scenarios

After looking at the team sizes and the PRs individually, it’s important to look at how everything works together. There are a lot of different scenarios you can plot to see where the game can go, depending on which roles get removed first or which PRs target each PRs. The most important ones you should account for are the worst-case scenarios for each team, where they lose as quickly as possible.

Look at this absurd design, used only as an example:

16 players

Town:
5 1-shot Vigilantes
7 Vanilla Townies

Mafia:
1 Bulletproof
2 Goons
1 Role Cop

Here’s the worst-case scenario for the Town with this design:

D1 begins, 12 Town members/4 Mafia members alive
D1 ends, a Vanilla Townie is voted out, 11 Town/4 Mafia
D2 begins, the Mafia kills a VT and all the Vigilantes shoot the remaining VTs, 5 Town/4 Mafia
D2 ends, a Vigilante is voted out, 4 Town/4 Mafia

And the game ends because the Mafia has trivially achieved its win condition.

Here’s the worst-case scenario for the Mafia with this design:

D1 begins, 12 Town members/4 Mafia members alive
D1 ends, the Bulletproof is voted out, 12 Town/3 Mafia
D2 begins, all the Vigilantes shoot the remaining Mafia members, 12 Town/0 Mafia


These examples were very simple in order to explain the process, but you can see a scenario simulation for a real Mafia game in this post, in the Buffy Mafia (a Season 11 game) design thread.

In general, the Town should have a minimum of four Day phases before it loses, and the Mafia, a minimum of two Day phases. The real number of phases they have to win can of course vary if the game is too small (<10 players) or too big (>30 players).


5. Is the game fun?

You took care of all the possible issues in the design to make it as fair as possible, but another important part of a Mafia game is that it is entertaining in the end. Mafia is an intense and emotional game, where people might get aggressive with each other while defending their arguments and discussing, so the design should not add any potential frustration to it. Make sure no elements of the game exist to make people feel annoyed or frustrated.
Another important thing is whether the game is designed to be fun for spectators or the players. There are games designed to be fun for the people who know which roles are in place and what interactions might happen, but are very frustrating for the players in it. Games should be fun for the players first, not for the designer.

• Are any unusual elements confusing?
  If a role is overly complex its player might not understand how it works well, and won’t be able to have fun with it.
  
  
• How much RNG is in the game?
  A team can feel frustrated if they lose one of its players, or the entire game, because of something beyond their control. Likewise, players won’t feel that they earned a victory if it was due to a random chance.
  
  
• Complementing the above, are there roles in the game that can make one side win instantly?
  Roles that win without any effort shouldn’t be in a game of Mafia.
  
  
• Does the design depend heavily on one or very few roles?
  The player(s) with those roles might become stressed with their responsibilities, and the rest might feel they are irrelevant to the decisions. And if those players are removed from the game early or are inactive, the game can lose all of its charm.
  
  
• Are there roles with negative utility?
  Roles that only exist to be a hindrance to their own team are not fun to play.

---

If the design passes all the items above, you can finally call it finished, good job! There’s one last thing left before you can approve the design...

 

[Pedro]

6. Reviewing role PMs

The design review is now complete; you have reviewed the mechanics, twists and roles, and deemed them appropriate. The final stage of the review process is editing the Role PMs that the designer has written.
There are a few things to check to avoid potential issues during the game:

• All the PMs need to follow the same style and structure (choice of words, order of sentences/paragraphs, formatting), because these can be used to speculate on who’s Town and who’s not. Except for the words that differ one role or alignment from another, the PMs should be identical;
• They should provide links to the important game threads. All should, obviously, have a link for the main game, while Mafia/Lovers/etc. should additionally have links to their respective threads;
• The sample role PM should be a copy of the Vanilla Townie PM. If the vanilla townies all have unique names, so should the sample PM;
• Roles that work in a group (e.g. Mafia, Masons, Neighbors) should have in their PMs the names of the other members of the group;
• They should include all the specifications and limitations of a role, so the players are aware of what they can do. This information has to be written in an unambiguous and easily understandable way. For example, a Doctor player shouldn’t have to PM the gamerunner to know whether they can or cannot heal themselves, or can or cannot target the same player on two consecutive nights;
• If a role has the possibility of being Modkilled for not following a set of rules, make sure the warning is highlighted.
• If the design follows a certain theme, some flavor names need to be reserved for the Mafia for their fake claims. These fake claims need to be reasonable: they can’t be “villain” names otherwise claiming them won’t win the players’ trust;
• Town and Mafia should have these standard win conditions:
  • Town: You win when all threats to Town have been eliminated.
  • Mafia: You win when your faction controls the majority of votes at day start.
• Fix grammatical errors, if any, in all the PMs. Make sure that they are easily readable.

 

[Pedro]

7. Approving or rejecting a game

For a game to be approved, it requires certain things from their designers:

• A list of all the roles, with detailed instructions on how to use them;
• A priority list for PRs, so the reviewers can know which will act before which;
• All PMs for the roles, following the requirements above;
• The game's classification. You can find more about that here;
• Any other kind of documentation important to the game. Additional mechanics, item descriptions, anything. The only thing that designers are free to write after the reviewing process is flavor. The game cannot run with missing documentation.

After all the items above ring true, and when you feel confident about the game, you can approve it, making sure it’s one step closer to being run! To do so, send a message to a member of the Review Team to inform your decision.
If you find yourself in a situation where the designer isn’t addressing your comments, or there’s any communication problem between you all, please also send a message to a member of the Review Team so they can talk with the designer and find a way to resolve the issue.