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[Shakerag]

This is the Notable Games Archive, where we keep all of Bay12's best rounds of Mafia.  The rounds that, due to some high-quality aspect, deserve to be remembered.  Since the forum is pretty old, there's a lot of great games here.  If you're a newbie, you should probably start with the Vanilla games, though everything else is awesome, too.

If you've just finished playing, reading, or running a particularly excellent game, come to this thread and nominate it!  This is the place to squawk about it for future generations of mafia players.

Spoiler: Vanilla and Beginner's Games (click to show/hide)

Beginner's Mafia I
The very first Beginner's Mafia round ever run.  The scumteam, inexperienced as it was, managed to pull the wool over the town's eyes after nearly getting caught the first day.  Notable both for terrible scum play and excellent scum play, as well as a number of attempted gambits.  Shows the downside to townie gambles, as well as being a good guide on trapping beginners and structured, end-game oriented scum play.

Beginner's Mafia III
This was the game that moved ICs from "player" status to "observer/tutor" status.  Both ICs rolled up scum and proceeded to thrash the town in a manly fashion--other than the fact that one of them died D2 after a carefully launched townie assault.  The other one was Webadict.  Despite the thrashing, this was a surprisingly tense game.  A last-minute townie replacement resulted in a near-loss for the scum team.  Demonstrates insightful playing at its best, on both sides.

Beginner's Mafia IV
Near-flawless scum game, along with a doctor gambit near the end that played out surprisingly well.  This is the game to look at if you want to see how to fake town.

Beginner's Mafia IX
Mostly up for its obscenely good flavor.  The town played a strong game in this one, as did the scum, despite numerous replacements.  Nothing especially new, but it's a truly great read.

Beginner's Mafia XXXIII
Both IC's were scum.  Need I say more?

Beginner's Mafia XXXV
Don't let the scum lurk to victory.  Do enjoy the magnificent flavor.

Not-So Beginner's Mafia
The scum convinced a townie to lynch confirmed town.  Good and bad play abound here from both sides.  If you didn't know what buddying was when you started reading, you'll certainly know by the end.

Not-So-Beginner Mafia: Panda Edition
This is basically the fastest town victory the board has ever seen.  Ever.  It was entirely behavior-based, too.  Of course, the scum were relatively inexperienced, but this is still an absurdly high-powered game.
Oh, and the flavor was also awesome--pity we couldn't see more of it.

Near-Mountainous Mafia
Good town play--unfortunately against some rather poor scum, but the hunting was relentless, and the scum gave a strong fight.

Spoiler: Classic setups (click to show/hide)

Dwarf Fortress Mafia 3
One of the more audacious scum claims ever seen, and an excellent use of night game logic.  The day game is somewhat murky, but improves throughout.  Also historical as one of the first games of mafia played on the board.

Vote Mafia 1
The very first round of Vote Mafia, introduced by Webadict.  This game marks not only the beginning of a popular series, but also the beginning of B12's insight-based day game.  The end result is a particularly close game, with high emotional tension towards the finish.

Wizard Duel 3
In a gametype characterized by the "there can only be one" mentality, this was one of the best examples of the scum working against themselves at the same time as they destroyed the town.  It's also one of the more curious instances of town WIFOM usage where, although it didn't work in the end, PrinnyBaal laid a most intriguing and intricate net.

Paranormal 13
One of the best games of Paranormal ever played.  The scum lost an early-game advantage due to some clever work by a Paranoid War Veteran, and were soon reduced to one player.  That player then successfully controlled the lynches for the rest of the game to his advantage.  Excellent work from both town and scum.

Paranormal 16
A particularly strong game from scum, town, and third parties.  Though a lack of trust destroyed much of the headway made by the exterminator, the game was still quite close and ended with a clever scum victory.

Paranormal 20
In the immortal words of Shakerag: "Hardcore Dopp hosing.  Xeno shenanigans.  Hivemind shenanigans."  What else could a body want?

Vengeful Mafia 11
This game showcases both the benefits and the dangers of taking one's time.  In a hammer-only setup, caution and a wish to take things slowly led to extreme fatigue on both teams' parts and no change in the D1 mislynch, but gave the opportunity for thought that led to a last-minute town victory.

King of the Mafia
King of the Mafia Continued
King of the Mafia 3
King of the Mafia 4
King of the Mafia 5
The King of the Mafia series is a long-running proving ground for the forum's top members, and for those who want to test themselves.  It's a concentrated series of mind games and psychological tactics, a form of Mafia which doesn't end until someone wins.  So far Webadict, Leafsnail, ToonyMan, Toaster, and Teneb have taken the crown.

Wild West Mafia
A forum veteran executes a nigh spotless scum game while detailing his thought process in scum chat. The scum player's victory was so thorough and well-documented that the game earned a reputation as an excellent game to learn scum from.

Spoiler: Bring Your Own Role (click to show/hide)

Bring Your Own Role Mafia 1
The very first BYOR run on the boards.  Most of the roles were fairly weak at this point, but the end result was still a complex and enjoyable game.  The end result pitted a serial killer against the remaining scum and a weak townie.  Also notable for the serial killer's fake roleclaim, which required a heavy post restriction throughout the entire game--and which no one saw through.

uPick Mafia: Panda Edition
Notable chiefly for the use of hammers, 19 players, and a scumteam that bussed two of its members, had 3/4 of itself replaced, and spent most of its scumchat arguing with itself, but still made it to victory.  It is also extremely long, so consider yourself warned.

iPick Mafia
If uPick is where the players pick the rolenames, iPick is something of an opposite.  The rolenames were chosen at random from Wikipedia, and then distributed to the players.  Besides flavor, which somehow managed to incorporate the scenario perfectly, town played a very strong game during both night and day.  The jester was also exemplary.

Bring Your Own Role Mafia 4
One of the few cult victories this board has ever seen--by ponies.  A fairly skilled scum game was cut short by a serial killer and massive stupidity on the team's part, which resulted in the rest of the town being taken over by the Pony Cult.  Particularly notable for the skillful fakeclaiming in a difficult setting, which ushered in the cult victory.

BYOR 8
Insanity, poetry, survivor masons.

Bring Someone Else's Role
In this form, everyone submits a role... for someone else to play as.  This resulted, of course, in the inevitable: Bookthras roleplaying the Wall of Flesh.  See also: amazing flavor.

BYOR 0
The 16th Webadict BYOR, BYOR 15 0 took his trademark high-power chaos to a new level.  Two players merged to become one two-headed super-SK, then lost their shared role to a thieving cultist.  Both the SK and the cultist were brought into a secretive mason chat to control the game and collaborate against the mafia.  The last mafioso had two kills per cycle, convincing the anti-mafia conspirators that the remaining independent townie was an SK.  Murder ensued.

Spoiler: Crazy closed setups (click to show/hide)

Time Travel Mafia
A game with a unique time-traveling mechanic.  Though both town and scum play was fairly average, the game makes the list due to its sheer ingenuity.

Liberal Crime Squad Mafia
An interesting mafia game, in that the rules constantly changed based on the scum's night actions and the town's votes during the day.  Not only that, but the third party dynamics were interesting as well.

Color Mafia
A game where each player was assigned a color.  Not only was the mild bastard modding solved, but the game ended with two masons against the remaining scum, after a risky survivor gambit where the masons pretended to be scum.  A very strong game all around, save the jester gambit at the beginning.  Don't copy that.

Toon Mafia IV
Has a Tom Cruise cult.  You should read it for this reason alone.

Toon Mafia V
Has an embedded dethy setup and the board's first successful staged fight.  One role gains power from being insulted.  Another one grows stronger by behaving angrily, which is mirrored by a second role which must act happy.  Successful town victory over a very strong scumteam.

Bay12 Mafia
This is the first run of Bay12 Mafia, which contains roles based on players here at the subforum.  Other than brilliant flavor written by Leafsnail, the game represents the first scum victory over a confirmed townie directing the town.

MSPA Mafia
Everyone was scum and won.  This is what happens when you hand out horribly broken survivor roles.  Also notable were the death cult, survivors, multiple scumteams, and multiplicity of cults... all in a game with 11 players.  Perhaps better left unmentioned was the sudden change of one player's role to "a fish."

Rysith's Semi-Bastard Mod Mafia
The scumteam was able to make fake mod posts, and the first two or three days were spent with the town trying to figure out how to vote.  In the end, the remaining scum player (and Pal Erdos) won when the scum "gave up" and asked to be lynched.  Seriously, you have to read this one to believe it.

Cybrid Mafia: Infiltrate//Seek//Eliminate
Two towns versus a cult.  Somehow, despite the entire cult being weeded out (due to an internal traitor), they still managed to win.  This may have been slightly cheap, but at least it was interesting.

Cybrid Mafia 5
An interestingly constructed scumteam, comprising an allied SK and Survivor combo, complete with a win from behind and excellent endgame play from all factions.

Choose-Your-Own-Masquerade
Almost a regular semi-open mafia game, but with the following points: there were no nights, players start with a number of points they can by role powers with, and there were mechanisms for gaining new points, and buying & selling powers throughout the game, and each player had a secret mask colour. Powers could only target masks and there were ways to swap masks in play. Scum put all their eggs in one basket, with one scum taking a kill and two others supporting him. The killer immediately had their kill stolen by a changeling randomly picking targets, and 4maskwolf viciously bussed his two scum mates getting everyone to believe he was town, right up until a townie killed him on a hunch.

Choose-Your-Own-Mafias
Like Choose-Your-Own-Masquerade, but with two mafia teams, two third parties, and twice as many points per player at the start of the game.  The system was brilliantly gamed.  In the words of Flabort and Deathsword:
"A game so thoroughly mechanically broken by its players that it merits mention; where between one scum team resurrecting eachother incessantly and the other one abusing hyperinflation to steal every single vote in the game and quickhammer 8 times consecutively.  Self-targeting changelings.  Town players were thoroughly confused by random powers showing up in their possessions and vanishing, and many streaks (good and bad) were broken."

Election
An election game in which two town players had to successfully vote for the town candidate, while a scum voter had to push a vote for the scum candidate. The twist being, the scum voter didn't know who their candidate was, leading to a series of dramatic turns as various players came to realise that they had each been championing the wrong candidate.

Spoiler: Bastard Mods (click to show/hide)

Kill Webadict Now
Exactly what it sounds like.  The goal of the game was to kill Webadict.  Shockingly, Webadict (the player) managed to survive through most of the first day, after which he was summarily lynched.  This game also features use of the "cells" tactic, originally pioneered in one of the early Paranormal games.  Sadly, the game ended due to a fluke, but what existed was fun.

Kill Webadict Now: Dakarian Edition
Besides being a spinoff of the already popular Kill Webadict Now, this game introduced a Roll-to-Dodge subgame in the flavortext.  Other than some unanticipated challenges for The Webadict, there was very little result--and again, the game ended on a fluke, albeit a more exciting one.  Also unusual were the "special guests," who were non-player characters with their own agenda and introduced the concept to the subforum.

Ill-Met By Moonlight
The mechanics of this game are still left undisclosed.  All that is known at this point is that the town played valiantly, the scum lost, and the flavor was absolutely brilliant.

Neruz's Bastard Mod Game
They lynched a player and got a 5-headed hivemind back.  They recruited the mod to a cult.  They lynched the mod.  They received another mod.  The cult members died.  Then the cult won.

No, I don't quite understand it either, but it was pretty hilarious when it happened.

Bellsounder
One of the few bastard mods that actually worked as planned.  The town got a good idea of what was going on, the scum outwitted them, and fun was had by all.  The simplistic flavor was also quite welcome.  This is a good example of how bastard mods should be played and created.

Gryph's Quick Bastard
The only game ever run here using the standard tactic of needing to lynch the mod.  The town didn't manage to figure this out, despite the copious hints.  On the other hand, this is another example of a particularly well-designed bastard puzzle.  For increased novelty, one of the players was the mod's puppet account, and he recruited spectators to help him play with the town.

Witches' Coven
Beautiful flavor.  Unwinnable wincons.  Complicated setups.  Crazy gambits.  Just go read it, will you?

Politibastard
Another game in the vein of Liberal Crime Squad mafia, but bastardized even further for everyone's amusement.

Mein Kampf: A Tale of Vainglourious Basterds
Nominated and placed here for Bay12's first game enriched by not only Quentin Tarantino, but also actual historical research.  Beyond that, the setup truly merited the Bastard Mod title, leading to a great many Shenanigans... no more can be said here without ruining the surprise, of course, but needless to say, the game is one worth reading.

Kill Your Own Shakerag Now

It actually was a bastard mod, but a bastard mod would advertise it as a semi-bastard just to be a bastard.

So incomprehensible and convoluted that it took about eight months for the main mod to figure out who won.  Theoretically a semi-bastard (only theoretically), it revolved the idea of the player Shakerag, sort of.  At one pivotal point, a non-player velociraptor ate a player and became a Shakerag.  Nobody quite understands KYOSN, but it was hilarious and entertaining, particularly as the bastard mechanics piled up higher and higher.

Flabort's High-Powered Bring Your Own Role 2
A full-bastard BYOR variant in which each player submits 2-8 roles, which are largely distributed randomly.  The result: 13 players.  80 roles.  Infinite actions.  1 loser.  16 winners.  10 days.

Mafia Marathon
23 four-five player setups, each deeply different and each more bastardy than the last, nestled in a point-based metagame.  Almost a whole year of Mafia, Mafia Marathon deserves archival not just for the perseverance of the players and the quality of the play, but for Tomasque's ingenuity in setup creation as well.

Bastard Paranormal 2
Interesting mechanics.

[Shakerag]

First order of business is adding Wild West Mafia to the list, under classic setups?  Taking volunteers to write a good, brief description of the game.

Also, just going down the line from the last thread:

Add BYOR 13 because it had 5 SKs and 2 Town-aligned SKs, and everyone both loves and secretly hates it. The fact that it ended with the Town-aligned Doomsayer killing 3 SKs and everyone else, and the SK-ally won without any SK winning should make it a fun romp.

Reading new games while I wasn't here...

Proc Gen Mafia 2 was cool.

I'm not nominating games I was in.

Those are the three candidates to be added, looking for feedback, yeas, nays, or whatever else should be said about these three games.

[ToonyMan]

Definitely add Wild West Mafia.

BYORs are stupid so I'm glad they're in their own category.

[4maskwolf]

I'm definitely biased but Supernatural 10?

[ToonyMan]

I'm definitely biased but Supernatural 10?

You mean mafia winning Super again from recruiting a killing role and being able to double kill at night, again?

[4maskwolf]

I'm definitely biased but Supernatural 10?

You mean mafia winning Super again from recruiting a killing role and being able to double kill at night, again?

I mean controlling the entire town's narrative for days on end and the wolves never seriously getting wagoned the entire game, but sure, let's go with that.

I'm like 99% sure the wolves win that even without the extra kill, Caz was too suss.

Edit: Like, ending aside, that game feels like a quintissential "good mafia play" game? Solid fakeclaims, good thread control, a cheeky convert from web, and maintaining enough convenient targets to keep them from going onto wolves.

[ToonyMan]

Winning off a Lucky lynch?

Third party SKs should fail to convert or lose their kill.

[4maskwolf]

I'm unclear as to why you're so salty about that game.

Like, if you don't think it's worthy, that's fine, it's probably pretty borderline anyway, but you seem to be basically attempting to strip away any good scum play and put it all on luck or broken mechanics.

[ToonyMan]

Mafia play was good.

I don't think anything else was.

[BluarianKnight]

I might be biased, but Election definitely seems notable to me.

[webadict]

Even though we did have the second killing role, it was never utilized except to end the game sooner, and the initial scum role itself was sufficiently underpowered compared to the Town (2 Mafia with a Vigilante Mafioso and a delayed revival JoAT vs. 10(+1?) Town is still fairly Town-sided). The win was on some good game mechanical usage, some good scum play, and LuckyOwl... existing.

I understand some of the misgivings especially related to LuckyOwl, but the double killing roles seems like it balanced in the end from a power perspective. And 4maskwolf played to their wincon the whole time, which was extremely well-done by them.

Overall, it is a solidly well-played game by the scumteam. Heck, it probably would still be a solidly well-played game by us if we hadn't won! We had a Cop, Doctor, pseudo-Watcher, Medium, Mason pair, and a Resurrectionist to contend with. That was a tough game, and I still think we only barely won.

[ToonyMan]

Town lynched not town half the time.
The dreamwalkers received nothing.
The doctor saved nobody.
The sage was killed by a serial killer who insanely claimed the kill the following day instead of playing to their wincon.
The priest basically didn't play and was a guaranteed lynch choice the entire game aka free lylo breaker.
The knight claimed on D1 for no reason.

[webadict]

Hmm... I feel like you might be having a not-so-good day, so I think this might not be productive.

Instead, I will say that if you'd like to play a game or something, let me know (I'm kinda into Path of Exile right now, though, since it's a new season and all, plus I suck in general at it, so, ya know, that's its own barrier.) I can also run a silly game like ONUW. I like how quick and ultimately silly it is.

[4maskwolf]

tbh even if you're having a good day ONUW sounds fun.

[4maskwolf]

I might be biased, but Election definitely seems notable to me.

Seconding this, though someone who played it should do the writeup for it.