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 Dimma Davidoff: the original mafia rules

The main text in this bulletin was excavated using the Internet
Archive Way Back Machine (Loading http://members.theglobe.
com/mafia­–rules as close to the date: 8:21:18 Mar 2, 1999
as is available).

Thanks to Azin Feizabadi, who first introduced us to the game.

Cover image: Royal Canadian Legion, Banff, Alberta, Canada.

Photograph by Benjamin Tiven, 2011

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 Dimma Davidoff: the original mafia rules

History

My name is Dimma Davidoff, I am the inventor of the original Mafia game.*

The game was created in 1986 in Moscow, Russia and quickly spread
all over the world. Players made many additional modifications of the game
rules, but the basic principle (informed minority vs. uninformed majority)
is still intact. Below, you can find the original rules of Mafia, which, in my
creator’s opinion, are the most simple, effective, and fun. If you have any
questions or comments, please email to me ddavidoff@hotmail.com.

c Copyright 1987, 1992, 1998, by D. Davidoff.

O

Game Core

Welcome to Mafia, a rite-playing game in which players become characters

suspected in having Mafia connections. Two teams: the Honest and the
Mafia will compete against each other. For the Honest team players, the
task is to stop Mafia before it eliminates them. Mafia members have to hide
their identity and pose as Honest players in order to manipulate the other
team players towards self-destruction. It is in each player’s best interest
to prove his or her innocence (or if you are a Mafia member, to hide your
guilt) by accusing and interrogating their fellow suspects, until all members
of the opposing team are eliminated from the game.

Pre-Game Instructions

Prepare a deck of cards, paper, pencils and at least six players. When all
players have assembled, count how many people are in. From the deck,
take as many cards as there are players according to the following list:

6–7 players: 2 black cards + others red / 8–10 players: 3 black cards +
others red / 11–13 players: 4 black cards + others red / 14–16 players:
5 black cards + others red

Inform the players of the number of the black cards included.

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Game Schedule

Sunrise Phase: First step is to divide the players into two teams. Each
player gets one card from the prepared and shuffled deck, secretly looks
at the card’s color and returns the card to the deck. Then everybody
closes their eyes and lowers their heads. Someone starts counting aloud
(usually the person who dealt the cards). After number 5, s/he continues
to count silently until 15, then s/he resumes counting aloud until 20.
During the silent period, the players who got black cards, should open
their eyes, raise their heads, and look at each other, then close their eyes
and lower their heads again. On count 20, everybody should open their
eyes. Now, all players are divided into two teams. Mafia are the players
who saw each other and therefore know each other. Honest people are
the players who saw nothing, don’t know each other, and don’t know who
the Mafia members are. This is the only advantage of Mafia: they know
each other. Honest players have to suspect everybody, but they have an
advantage of being the majority. The main struggle during the next phase
will be between the informed minority and the uninformed majority.

Day Phase: Talk ... At any moment, any player may put another
player in the “suspected to be the Mafia” position. S/he should (better)
provide grounds for the suggestion. Everyone (including the accused)
has a right to argue. But when the accuser asks to vote, everyone should
vote by raising their hands. If the majority of the players (not counting
the accused) votes for “Guilty as member of the Mafia,” the suspected
player is “sentenced to death” and s/he is out of the game until the
end of the round. If the accuser fails to get the majority on her/his side,
the game continues with the same number of players. Accusations may
happen any number of times during the discussion. Players who are
eliminated from the game do not reveal their identity until the end of the
game and should not try to help others who are still in the game. There
is no way to know the team identity of the “dead” unless you have
the next phase.

Night Phase: This is the only phase when you can find out if all Mafia mem-
bers have been eliminated. So, once in a while, someone should propose
to have a “Mafia Night.” If the majority of the players who are still in the
game agrees, the Night begins. Everyone takes a pencil and a piece of
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paper, and secretly writes on it. Honest people must write “honest” on
the note, while members of the Mafia must write the name of the person,
whom they want to eliminate from the game. After that, everybody puts
their notes in the middle and someone reads them. The number of the
notes with the names will reflect the number of survived Mafia members,
so the players will know if they have “killed” an Honest person or a Mafia
member during the day. If the same name appears on all Mafia notes,
the named person is “murdered” and is out of the game until the end of
the round. In any other case, the named players survive the Mafia attack
and the game continues with the same number of players.

For example, if three members of the Mafia are in the game, there should
be three notes with names on them. Only if all three notes have the same
name, that person is “murdered.” If only one member of Mafia is still in the
game, her/his single shot will be enough to eliminate somebody.

The game ends when there are no shots during Mafia Night or all Honest
people have been eliminated. Start again.

Pointers for the beginners

1. Players are free to introduce new procedures during the game, but
no one has to follow them unless s/he finds their usage at that moment
reasonable.

2. Accidental or purposeful peeking by red card holders during the

Sunrise Phase should be discouraged, however it will not give any
advantage during the game. The trick of the game is always to persuade
others to accept your knowledge and never to have the knowledge per
se. By the way, this is the reason for my reservations about including
different knowledge bearing characters (inspector, angel, seer). The only
knowledge in the game is Mafia connections, everything else is artificial.

3. Paper and pencils should be the same for everybody. Otherwise, it will
be easy to find who have written what during the Mafia Night.

4. For a new group, unless a clear leader emerges, the first round may
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be a little slow. In the second round people who were unjustly eliminated
have enough drive to prevent it from happening again. The third game
is great without any reservations. If a group has someone who played
before, s/he should provide initial leadership from the beginning.

Scoring

If Mafia wins, each surviving Mafia player receives a number of points

equal to the initial number of the Honest players. If Honest wins, every
Honest player receives a number of points equal to the number of
surviving Honest players.

* In his autobiographical account of growing up in Manhattan,

Through the Children’s Gate (New York: Knopf, 2006), Adam
Gopnik recounts a spate of evenings spent with friends eating
Chinese takeout and playing The Mafia Game:

“The game demonstrates the many and pressing kinds of

double-bind logic that fill a social group if its members suspect there
are enemies within it. If you are in the Mafia, you have to kill all the
people who correctly suspect that you are, but you can’t be too
obvious that the people being killed are the ones who suspect you,
since that would confirm the truth of their suspicions. If you are a
villager [called “honest” in the original version] you have to share
information with the others in order to persuade them to vote the
right way, but you can’t share too much information, since some of
the villagers with whom you’re cooperating are certainly mafia.”

He goes on:

“The ostensible pleasure of the game lies in testing your own

skills as a dissembler and as a spotter of dissemblers—in lying
and spotting liars. Both eager cooperation and absolute paranoia
are essential to the strategic game. Yet the really fascinating thing
about Mafia is seeing how much pure irrationality lingers in its
play, how little real deduction and how much sheer panic govern
its conduct. The game quickly breaks down, as social groups will,
into small circles of belief, which become lynch mobs of distrust
on the next turn.”

Over the past couple of decades, the contemporary French

sociologist Bruno Latour has propagated a distinction between
“matters of fact” and “matters of concern.” Fundamentally,
Latour is out to demolish the bedrock faith in scientifically-proven

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“facts” constituent of Modern-era, Enlightenment-founded

thinking. Because scientific assertions are based on experiments
performed IN A VACUUM (both literally and metaphorically),
he argues that while useful for debunking all manner of long-held
myths, their “truth” is ultimately a distortion of reality, too.

In other words, facts are fundamentally flawed precisely because

they are conceived in detached and autonomous circumstances.
As such, they remain a pernicious means of perceiving, and so
dealing with, the world. Latour calls instead for the facility to grasp
not isolated objects but interconnected things —the constantly
shifting scenographies of interests, accidents, contradictions,
conspiracies, changes in fortune, allegiance, currency, weather,
and so on. And while, amid the ever-increasing prevalence and
visibility of networks, we are surely becoming better at apprehending
these relations—and their knock-on effects—and the effects of
those effects—he maintains that our ways of looking are still way
too grounded in the old mode.

In one particular talk titled A Cautious Prometheus (2008), Latour

notes how the fallacy of facts is reflected in the old models of
modeling, from architectural renderings and mechanical blueprints
to scale models and prototypes, from perspective drawing and
projective geometry to Computer-Aided Design and Google Maps.
In their various distillations, flattenings, and abstractions, all bear
a marked lack of resemblance to the phenomena they purport to
represent. These simulations, or “gatherings” are less utopian,
claims Latour, than simply atopic. Hence his persistent call for new
ways of *drawing things together*—making things public not from
a resolutely objective, external point of view, but from within and
while going with the flow.

Here, then, the mundane Mafia Game is offered as a simple,

precarious, and not altogether serious means to set up a different
kind of vantage. Contrary to the usual omniscience of the bird’s-
or God’s-eye view common to the modeling techniques listed
above, when called upon to play either Honest or Mafioso, your
perspective of the whole encounter is always from within, as an
invested PLAYER. An advocate of what is gaining popular ground
as “object-oriented philosophy,” Latour often speaks of ostensibly
inert phenomena in terms of fully-loaded “betting” and “gambling”
“agents” and “actors.” Little surprise, then, that easy-assembly
role-play seems an appropriate format to witness how a given
situation’s “object” plays out (or perhaps orients itself).

Crucially, the game’s short-lived alliances, enmities, suspicions,

accusations, and protests assemble and collapse not only within a
single round or single game, but with exponential complexity from
one game to the next, and from one day or week to the next.
When a recurring group of players become acquainted with both
each other and the game, and as burgeoning realworld relationships
overflow into the fictional scenography, negotiations become

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perceptibly contaminated and, naturally enough, entropic. As the

game’s founder Dimma Davidoff, who first developed the game
as a perfectly serious academic psycho-sociological experiment,
proclaims, “The third game is great.” Beyond that, who knows?

Davidoff further asserts the enigmatic and wholly Latourian

injunction that “Players are free to introduce new procedures
during the game, but no one has to follow them unless s/he finds
their usage at that moment reasonable.” Such chronic, baffling
contingency sounds a lot like that recounted by Latour in his
summary of “The Year in Climate Controversy” for Artforum
in December 2010:

“... of course, there is no single institution able to cover, oversee,

dominate, manage, handle, or simply trace an issue of such shape
and scope. Even a summit of all the nations of the earth, preceded
by the most strident media campaigns, could not digest an issue so
intractable and so enmeshed in contradictory interests as this one ...
myriad changes at all levels of existence, from cars to clothes, from
architecture to industry, from agriculture to sewage. How could
we imagine a global agreement amid so many entangled interests?”

With this in mind, potential players are pointed in the direction

of Wikipedia’s Mafia (party game) page to witness the extent of
supplementary roles that have been added to the game’s countless
commercial and hobbyist adaptations over the past couple of
decades. Examples include the Teenage Werewolf who must say
the word “werewolf” at least once each round, the Dentist who
may select any other player at night and remove all of their teeth
to prevent them speaking during the following day, and the Village
Idiot whose only objective is to convince the rest of the town to
kill him. Davidoff dismisses such additions as superfluous, merely
distracting from the game’s basic coefficient: “The only knowledge
in the game is Mafia connections, everything else is artificial.”
And yet Latour would surely counter that an altogether artificial
game is entirely appropriate these days; in fact, implies a whole
other scenario in which the redesign of the game—and the ability
to observe the consequences of that redesign as and when they
happen—and to respond to those consequences in situ—becomes
the game itself: The New Mafia Rules.

During the week beginning 18 July 2011, for instance, we introduced

our own new character, a “Rupert Murdoch” who, in addition to
his/her initial designation as Honest or Mafioso, is also privvy to
the nightly carnage. First thing next morning, Murdoch is required
to deliver a report to the whole community, the veracity of which
depends entirely on his/her daily discretion and/or whim. Ultimately
and uniquely, Murdoch’s aim is neither to eliminate nor safeguard the
rest of the players, only to perpetuate the game—and his or her
presence in it—for as long as is practicably possible.

(Stuart Bailey)

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