Sunday, everyone went over to the Consortium to hoover up the leftovers from the 12th Night party — the post-festivity festivities usually include board and card games. We even brought some new ones over to try out but never got to them thanks to a few Oldies but Goodies making an appearance.

One, which Dave’s mentioned before, is a fun card game called Apples to Apples which has an interesting (and I think unintended, since it has nothing at all to do with the game itself) side effect of invariably telling everyone at the table just a leeeetle bit too much about everyone else at the table than we needed to know :)

The other game that took up the evening doesn’t require cards or dice or counters or anything at all except a big group of friends with the gift for Bullshit. Like many fun time-killers that are absolutely great fun with groups of friends, this one is from our my much-missed friend Scott, who taught us the game back when he lived here in Denver. I’m going to share the rules with you here.

The game is called… umm… “Mafia vs. Mob”… maybe… we usually just call it “that thing where we kill each other.”

For every cycle of the game, one person has to be the narrator. Nothing bad happens to them that game. The narrator has everyone close their eyes and (with the radio playing or the entire group blindly singing show tunes to cover up the noise), taps the shoulder of a few people in the group. These are the “Mafia” players for this game. Usually, it works out to one (1) Mafia player per (3) total participants, but always round down.

Everyone can then open their eyes (narrator says when). People stare into their close friends’ faces, looking for signs of treachery. Then the narrator indicates that night is falling over the fair city of [insert silly name here], and everyone closes their eyes. At the narrator’s request, the Mafia folks open their eyes and (silently) decide who among the villagers dies first… meanwhile, the narrator keeps babbling about the cool night air, the pitter patter of evil little feet, etc.

Morning breaks, everyone wakes up. Well, not everyone — one guy’s sleeping with the fishes.

A Mob forms (hence the name of the game) and decide who among them is Evil and Must Be Destroyed. Mafia people try to point the finger at innocents where possible, of course. In the end, Mob rule prevails and someone swings. Secure in the knowledge that Justice Has Been Done, everyone goes back to sleep.

Someone else dies in the night. Repeat above procedures in a dismal cycle of destruction until the Mafia is wiped out or the Mob is down to one (1) when night falls. In the event of a tie (one person from each side is left), the win goes to whomever’s turn it is to kill kill kill. [ed’s note: the Mob should have won our last game on Sunday — I think we did it wrong at that point. Anyway.]

And that’s the game. We’ve usually played it before starting other games (especially Amber), but Scott first taught it to me one night while we and a couple other people sat around a booth at a sports bar waiting for an Avs game to start. Good stuff.

Note to self: Must try this before the Amber Attribute Auction this Sunday. Get people in the mood.

We call this "Werewolf" and know a few variants on it.

I think we did that last round wrong, too, but the problem was, we had 1 Mafioso and 2 villagers going to sleep. The Mafioso was guaranteed to kill one of the villagers during the night, but in the morning that would leave 1 Mafioso and 1 villager alive -- in which circumstance the Mafioso always wins.

Which seems to imply that when you get to 1&2 going to sleep, you should be able to just end the game. But that seems wrong.

Mafiaaaaa!!! That's how we'd announce it in the dorm freshman year, sending out the call to assemble in the common room... I never tired of that game, and the skills I picked up in shifting the spotlight and inciting mob sentiment against someone else have served me well in more than one game of Amber. :)

The suite across the hall played it more as a story thing, the narrator making up longwinded descriptions of what was going on in the night, how the unfortunate victim was found in the morning; we figured the most interesting part was the person-person interactions, so the "nights" were merely short and extremely silent pauses between rounds... Silent, because we figured it wasn't fun to have to pretend you didn't hear Quinn shifting around and pointing, or whatever, so we were allowed to use noises in the night as "evidence".

We also played using cards, to make the assignments to Mafia or townsperson or other entirely random. Get the number of cards for the people playing; Mafia are the Jacks; healer is the Ace of Hearts; detective is the King. Everyone else is low black cards.

The healer, every nighttime, woke up after the Mafia ("Almost thought they'd heard something, and went to check on...") and pointed to one person; if they pointed to the person the Mafia had slated to die; that person escaped the reaper. The physician couldn't heal himself, of course. ;)

The detective woke up every night after the healer, and got to point to one person; the narrator then either nodded or shook his head, indicating whether that person was one of the Mafia.

You can't ever admit what you are, and hints like "Naw, I really don't think it's Erica" or "It would be a big mistake to kill me" can be used by both sides... When you lynched someone, you flipped their card; when you lynched the healer, you all had to pretend to be terribly sorry... ;)

You can make narrator assignment random, too; first person who dies. We did this by gathering around a table, setting the cards out in front of us where they could be picked up (slightly bending the cards so they could be picked up without scrabbling), and holding out our hands where they could be tapped. Everyone closes their eyes, counts to ten slowly, in which time the Mafia taps someone's hand. Then the healer gets his count of ten to tap someone's hand, then the detective gets a count of ten to look at someone's card, then day breaks and you have a dead guy and a bunch of concerned citizens... And if the healer actually managed to save the poor guy, you get a lynch mob anyway. :)

Huh! Should've looked over Meera's link first. Thinking back, yes, I suppose you can admit you're the healer or the detective...

And using specially-made cards would make the most sense. If you're not, make sure you list out what card is what right after you hand 'em out... People get confused. Or pretend to. ;)

Anyway, yeah, the ultimate Amber gateway game. :)