Mafia Game Setting Research Using Game Refinement Measurement

This paper explores the game sophistication of a popular party game called Mafia or Werewolf. It focuses on the playing settings, i.e., the number of total players (say N) including citizen, mafia (m), sheriff (s) and doctor (d), denoted as MFG(N, m, d, s). Computer simulations for a simple version of Mafia game are conducted to collect the data while game refinement measure is employed for the assessment. The results indicate several interesting observations. For example, the measure of game refinement reduces as the number of players increases. This implies that Mafia game would become boring as the number of players becomes too large. MFG(N, m, s, d) can be played reasonably with \(N \in \{14, 15, 16\}, m \in \{5, 6\}, s = 1\) and \(d \in \{1, 2\}\). In particular, MFG(15, 5, 1, 1) or MFG(15, 6, 1, 2) is the best to play under the assumption that its game refinement measure is within the sophisticated zone. Moreover, the level of players affects the game balancing and game sophistication. For example, mafia would dominate citizens if all players are weak, which implies that the game sophistication would be reduced.