Epicmafia

By: Guest Reviewer

On: February 10th, 2010

[This is a guest review by Cosmic Fool. If you’d like to write a guest article for TIGSource, go here.]

I live in Australia, and that means 2 things primarily; I’m lazy and no matter where I live, American ghettos usually have better internet than I do.

This makes it incredibly hard to play new games and when I do hit the bandwidth cap halfway through the month, it’s easy for me to get bored. Luckily, there are games out there for the man with dial-up speed net and I find it’s my duty to share this joy that’s accessible at 8kbs with the world.

Epicmafia is a nifty little game that streamlines and refines the popular forum game into something quite wonderful. If I were to market it to the fratboy, I would call it an online multiplayer class-based thriller in a mafia setting. For everyone else, it’s a game of wits and psychology as all sides of the match attempt to root out the others.

The multiplayer suite itself is quite robust for a browser-based game. Once you register (a free, quick, and easy process) it’s easy to jump into a match from the lobby or create your own match once you’ve learned the ropes. Quite quickly you’ll begin to understand both the game-specific slang and the easiest methods of beguiling your opponents.

The community is vibrant and very much alive and you’ll soon begin to recognize ‘famous faces’ around the community. Players are encouraged to play by the rules and not throw away matches carelessly due to an online high score board and one of the world’s only well-implemented karma systems.

In short, this game manages to create interesting and incredibly entertaining gameplay in a lightweight and easy-to-understand package. It is entertaining not on the basis of its amazing new engine but because of the variety of people and strategies you’ll come across. To get started will take you less than 5 minutes, so why not give it a shot?

Posted in Browser Games, Multiplayer | Tags: lucidrains, ReviewedByCosmicFool

Derek

I’m including reviewers in the tags, so if you like a particular review, you can see what else that person has written for the site.
http://freebooterkommand.blogspot.com shipwreck

I have fond memories of playing Mafia at parties and church homegroups. It’s exciting to see people trying to live the Christian life actively deceiving and accusing other.

Now I can do it in the comfort of my armchair!
http://lumberingdream.com/ !CE-9

that reminded me to get back to my Citadels games at the also free (of ads too), also browser based adaptation of Bruno Faidutti’s german / non-collectible card game, Citadels.

Citadels of Achilles is available at http://ciudadelas.frenopatico.net/ and speaks English and Spanish. (Well, I hope the spam filter doesn’t bite my post in two.)
Mr. Podunkian

“This makes it incredibly hard to play new games and when inevitably I do hit the bandwidth cap halfway through the month, Itâ€™d be easy for me bored”

a fistful of typos here.
Jamey

Derek, have you ever considered “hiring” editors–and I mean people with real editing experience–to go over copy before articles are published? I guess there may not be too many folks reading TIGSource who care all that much, but I find grammatical mistakes to be irritating, especially in otherwise engaging articles (like this one). I’d be glad to help if you ever decided to get a copy editor on board. And I mean for free. Indie gaming and editing are both passions of mine.
silpheed

still better than the articles a week ago, especially the ones written by Alex Macqueen, good grief (though he’s only 13, I feel kinda bad for bashing the kid but still)
silpheed

sorry, didn’t mean to bring that up again. but typos aside, this week has been much much better.
Derek

Usually I proofread the guest articles myself, but today I slipped. I fixed it up now.

@Jamey – Thanks for offering to help! But it’s probably easier if I do it myself. I’ll just be more careful in the future.
http://lumberingdream.com/ !CE-9

On nights like this I do wonder what on earth could have been wrong with recommending a free (in probably every respect), independently developed (not by me), browser based, multiplayer game.

As I did in my previous, censored post. Really, what?
Jotaf

Sorry, but My Brute doesn’t count, especially if you give the referral link to your account :P

I don’t care much for this type of games but I’m all for variety here in TIGS!
Wirt

What happened to classic Mafia? So many strange roles and unintuitive mechanics don’t do the game any good.
Bobo

I’ll never understand this game.
http://freebooterkommand.blogspot.com shipwreck

*”What happened to classic Mafia? So many strange roles and unintuitive mechanics donâ€™t do the game any good.”*

Agreed. Very strange and a lot of griefers but it’s possible to get a good game going.
ecto

2010 an you still have bandwidth caps? i dont think there even are any dsl providers over here here that has that.
Pierre B.

I must be old-fashioned, but I expect a game review to give a bare minimum description of what a game is. Sure, I could google Mafia, but you know, this is supposed to be a review, not guessing game.
Neocow

Try UrbanUndead
Wirt

Pierre, Mafia is pretty hard to explain, it’s mostly taught by just showing a game and commenting here. But I’ll try. I’ll explain the tabletop version, because it’s the base set of rules that is usually expanded on.

Basically, there’s two sides in a game: the townspeople (Villagers, politicians, whatever you want. Nice guys) and the Mafia (Werewolves, vampires, bad guys), and a Gamemaster sort of fellow who basically watches for the players to play by the rules and announces what happens. The GM is usually chosen beforehand, and Mafia/townspeople roles are chosen randomly by handing out cards. Players don’t know who’s on which side at first.
The game goes in turns of day and night and usually begins during the first night: Everyone closes their eyes, than Mafia wakes up, looks at each other (Now they know who’s Mafia) and choose their victim.
Then the day comes, everyone wakes up, GM announces who was killed and the players start trying to work out who’s the mafia. Mafia also tries to frame the nice guys. By the end of the day players vote for who they’re going to shoot (Put in jail, lynch, hang). In some variants you get to say your “last words” before being shot.
When a player is shot or killed by the Mafia, their card is revealed, so everyone knows wether they were in the Mafia or with the town.
The game goes on until either there’s no Mafia left (The town is safe, townspeople win), or Mafia outnumber the townspeople (Mafia wins).

The game is usually expanded by adding a Comissar (Who can check wether a player in with the Mafia at night, called a Cop in EM), a Doctor (Who protects a person from Mafia at night and a Maniac (Who kills someone at night and has to be the last man standing to win, Killer in EM) and a lot of other roles.

EM tries to hold true to most of these rules, and the role of the GM is given to the server. And there’s 44 extra roles for you to get utterly confused.

I hope it helps.
EngineerLackey

@ecto: where’s “over here”? In the USA there are lots of people subject to bandwidth caps, it’s just that the exact amount/logic of the cap is either kept secret (often behind a vaguely worded “excessive usage” clause) or buried so deep in the fine print that it’s practically impossible to find. It helps that the caps are pretty generous compared to the average Australian plan (e.g. known to be 250GB up+down per month for Comcast, and estimated to be similar for Qwest DSL); the strategy seems to be to impose a cap that’s just strict enough to keep TV/movie streaming from becoming the norm. I don’t think the FTTH services have known caps, but their market share on a national level is tiny.
Tet

But only two roles? That’s not very epic.
Wirt

Trust me, when players are good and know tricks other than “lolRL”, two roles are enough to have epic games. With enough players and if you want to experiment and expand your strategy, you might add “hooker”, “miller”, “hunter” or “deputy” (Not seen in EM yet, becomes the commissar if commissar is killed), for example.
When each player has a role, it devalues all roles. After all, you can just shoot at random, you’ll hit someone anyway.

Of course, you can build some interesting setups with EM’s tools, like a classic game with a killer, a normal cop and an insane cop.
RedCoyote

lets lynch gays