Mafia Engine

Engine for Mafia-like games. Unsurprising, right?

This project is a Proof-of-Concept, and is being rebuilt at:

https://github.com/open-mafia/open_mafia_engine

for higher flexibility and readability.

Development

The initial game engine was being built, along with a minimal set of abilities (later on, a large set of stock abilities will be available). Currently, the example game runs approximately like this:

and everything about the game is hard-coded (no config yet).

We plan on fixing that in the open_mafia project.

Motivation

Running a Mafia game, either in real life (IRL) or on a forum, takes a bit of work. If that Mafia game is non-trivial, such as having a convoluted set-up or being a BYOR (Bring Your Own Role), maintaining all players' statuses, actions, votes, etc. becomes exponentially harder to keep track of.

By making a unified representation of a Mafia game, as well as an engine to automatically calculate the state of your game-world, this difficulty gets front-loaded into defining the game (i.e. before the game starts), so running the game itself takes much less time and energy. It can also help reduce the amount of errors, increase consistency, and remove moderator bias.

Additionally, by defining games in a machine-readable way, the task of machine learning on Mafia games (e.g. predicting the mafia based on words, playstyle, etc.) becomes much easier, as all the data is there and doesn't need to be gathered by hand.

Planned features

Near-term:

• General definition of a mafia game (via config)
• Runnable GM tool with command-line UI
• Example ("vanilla"/"mountainous") mafia game
• State saving, with full history

Long-term:

• Workable API
• Interaction with various mafia forums (starting with Bay12Games forums <3):
  • Automatic thread parsing
  • Helper for modding/GM-ing (player statistics, vote counts, etc.)
  • Searchable history, i.e. for machine learning tasks
• ???
• Profit!