Mafia Game Rules: How to Play Mafia and Werewolf [2026]

The Rules, Start to Finish

You need at least six players, and the game hits its stride around ten. Wikipedia's entry on the game dates it precisely: it is "a social deduction game created in 1986 by Dmitry Davidoff, then a psychology student at Moscow State University", first played in the spring of 1987 at the university's Psychology Department. Forty years later the core loop has not changed.

Setup. One person volunteers as moderator and does not take a role. Everyone else draws a role in secret, usually from shuffled cards or slips of paper. Most players are ordinary townspeople with no ability. A small minority are mafia, and they are the only players who know who their teammates are. The moderator holds the complete picture and reveals none of it.

The night phase. Everyone closes their eyes. The moderator asks the mafia to open theirs, and they silently agree on one player to eliminate, pointing rather than speaking. If you are using special roles, the moderator wakes each of them in turn. Then everybody closes their eyes again.

The day phase. The moderator announces who died overnight. The survivors argue, accuse each other, and vote to eliminate one suspect. The same source describes the whole structure as "two alternating phases: first, a night-phase, during which those with night-killing-powers may covertly kill other players, and second, a day-phase, in which all surviving players debate and vote to eliminate a suspect". That is the entire game engine. Everything else is decoration.

Winning. The town wins the moment the last mafioso is eliminated. The mafia win the moment they equal or outnumber the remaining townspeople, because from that point they can simply vote as a bloc and no outcome changes it. Call the game there rather than playing out the formality.

Optional roles. The detective checks one player's allegiance each night and learns the truth. The doctor protects one player each night, canceling the kill if they guess right. Add them one at a time and only once your group has played a plain round, because each one changes the balance more than it looks like it should.

How Many Mafia You Actually Need

This is the argument every group has, and there are three answers in circulation. Davidoff's original rules suggest a third of the players, rounded to the nearest whole number. Andrew Plotkin, who wrote the Werewolf version of the rules, recommends exactly two mafiosi regardless of table size. Most internet lists split the difference and guess.

There is actual research on this. Mark Braverman, Omid Etesami and Elchanan Mossel published Mafia: A theoretical study of players and coalitions in a partial information environment in 2008, modeling the game as a mathematical object. For a game with no detective, they found the two sides have comparable chances of winning "exactly when the total population size is R and the mafia size is of order sqrt(R)". In plain terms: the square root of your player count.

Ten players gives you about three mafia. Sixteen players gives you four. That is close to Davidoff's third at small tables and well below it at big ones, which matches what most experienced groups arrive at by trial and error. The same paper found that adding even a single detective swings the balance hard toward the town, far enough that the mafia would need a size linear in the player count rather than its square root to stay level. Read that the way it is meant: a detective is not a free garnish. If you add one, add a mafioso to pay for it.

One more lever, and it is free. Plotkin also points out that "the humans' chances are significantly weaker when there are an even number of players (including the moderator)", because even counts tend to end on a night kill rather than a vote. Count the moderator in when you do that arithmetic: ten at the table plus a moderator is eleven, which is the parity you want.

Mafia or Werewolf? Same Game, Different Coat

If half your group calls it Werewolf and the other half calls it Mafia, they are both right and nobody has to concede. The ruleset is identical. Plotkin is direct about it on his own rules page: "I did not invent this game; Dimitry Davidoff did, in 1986." He picked it up at the 1997 National Puzzlers' League convention under the name Mafia and changed the theme for a reason he states just as plainly: "I think werewolves are niftier, so I changed it."

The retheme was not cosmetic in its effect. Wikipedia records his argument that the mafia framing had less cultural resonance and that "the werewolf concept fit the idea of a hidden enemy who looked normal during the daytime". It also changed who was willing to play. "Pick a villager to lynch" and "pick someone to shoot" land very differently at a family table, which is worth knowing before you explain the rules to a room that includes your aunt.

The Two Rules That Quietly Bench Two People

Here is the part the rules pages state and then move past. Wikipedia is unambiguous on the first one: "Live games require a moderator who does not participate as a player." Not a preference. The moderator is the only person holding complete information, so they cannot hold a role as well without breaking the game.

The second rule is that the dead stay dead and stay quiet. Wikipedia puts it as "dead players are not permitted to attempt to influence the remainder of the game". Plotkin is blunter, and includes himself in the warning: it is "really important that dead players not speak, and the moderator not speak outside his official capacity", and that holds even for "a blatant misstatement about a matter of record".

Both rules are correct. Both are also expensive. Run the arithmetic on a group of seven: one moderator plus one night-one victim means two people are spectators before anybody has said a word, and five are playing. After the first vote it is three and four. Barely into your party game, nearly half the room is watching.

You can see what happens next coming. The spectators start whispering. Somebody who knows exactly who the mafia are lets a look slip at the wrong moment, and the table reads it instantly. Moderate enough rounds and you learn the game rarely dies from a rules dispute. It dies because the people who were eliminated got bored and became a second, worse source of information.

Strategy: Stop Reading Faces

Almost every Mafia strategy guide tells you to watch for nervous tells. The evidence says that is close to worthless. Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo pooled 206 documents covering 24,483 judges for Accuracy of deception judgments, published in Personality and Social Psychology Review in 2006. The headline finding: "people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive and 61% of truths as nondeceptive".

Four percentage points above a coin flip, with a built-in bias toward believing whoever is talking. Your certainty that Sarah's laugh was off is not evidence. It feels like evidence, which is exactly why it costs the town so many rounds.

What does carry information is behavior you can write down. Track who voted with whom and who changed their vote once the count was already decided. Notice who spends the day phase agreeing with the majority without ever nominating anyone, because mafia want a townsperson eliminated but do not want their fingerprints on the decision. Notice who defended the player who turned out to be mafia, and who went quiet immediately afterwards.

Playing as mafia, the counter is the same in reverse. Be useful out loud from the first day. Nominate someone, give an ordinary reason, and be wrong occasionally in the way a townsperson is wrong. The mafia who says nothing on day one is the mafia who gets voted out on day two, every time. If you want more games built on the same read-the-room skill, our guide to Spyfall alternatives covers the closest relatives.

Five Ways Groups Ruin This Game

Frequently Asked Questions

If You Want the Game Without the Bench

Play Mafia properly at least once. The moment a table turns on an innocent player with total confidence is worth the setup, and no app reproduces the sound a room makes when the vote goes the wrong way.

For the other four nights of the month, when nobody wants to moderate and you have eleven minutes before the food arrives, a phone-based round covers it. The closest relatives are laid out in our guide to the impostor game and its rules, and if your group came to this from a video game rather than a card deck, the Among Us alternatives for iPhone list is the better starting point.