My final backloggd review of 2022, or second of 2023 if you are European or whatever other “superior” time zone you live in. For this hilarious milestone I decided to pick a game that's not really a video game, but something that I've sunk way too much time into and to my surprise has a page on backloggd. Being the first to find this, I decided to dump this fatass review onto here and jack up the average rating to 5 stars before someone else finds it.
I first came across mafia.gg when a Smash Bros. summit was holding a game of mafia and having top Smash professionals play the game in real life. These streams inspired a Discord server I frequent and we were looking for some way we could all play mafia together. Eventually we stumbled upon mafia.gg thinking "hey, this might work." Sure enough, it did, and after a few rounds, everyone was hooked, making mafia.gg a regular occurrence for the server near the end of 2019 up through the first few months of 2020. Prior to this, the server never really had a game that everyone played besides Smash Bros. and the height of mafia.gg there (alongside Jackbox when it became the big thing in the months after mafia.gg died down) was the most unity that server ever experienced. Considering it was a server heavily tied to Smash leaks and speculation, a very easy way to get heated, there were a lot of incidents, users that just held disdain towards each other and dragged down the server's quality of life, etc. This game being able to bring the server together and effectively lay the groundwork for another Discord community (the ex mafia/jackbox players who got tired of the Smash Bros. speculation and moved to their own place) that's still active to this day is pretty admirable.
Eventually I started dabbling into the public lobbies, and they were an experience. Most of the mafia.gg crowd from Discord did not enjoy playing the game in public with randos, but I have low standards and the public games were typically much larger and able to go more in-depth with the sites mechanics than our at most 10 player games that eventually struggled to get more than 3 people interested. Mafia.gg effectively became the backbone of my 2020. If I needed something to do, I'd go to the website, check out some of the public lobbies, and hope for the worst.
As for the actual game itself, Mafia.gg follows the endless battle between the town and the mafia, where the mafia will kill a player every night, and then in the day act like innocent town members while the town has to deduce who the mafia members are. It was basically a text based version of Among Us before Among Us was cool, but it also had roles (before Among Us had roles) that could give the town or a mafia member unique attributes. Some examples of roles include
-The cop being able to check someone each night to see if they were sided with the mafia
-The doctor being able to protect a town member from being killed at night from the mafia
-The arms dealer being able to give random people guns which you could use to end someone's fucking life on the whim of a simple button press if they were suspicious or made a meme you didn't find funny
-abilities to fuck with the cops report
-roles that just announced mafia members to EVERYONE out of nowhere
-roles that could suicide bomb, killing themselves alongside another player of their choice
-a whole ass fucking CULT separate from both town and mafia that they had to worry about before cult absorbed most of the players
-the Manipulator, who if the mafia wins, goes "fuck you actually I win instead" if they survive the game, you get the idea.
There were so many roles capable of creating engaging gameplay mechanics or chaos, almost always the latter, that other social deceit games were never quite able to replicate. You could have a standard game with a few villagers, a few mafias, a cop and a doc, you could craft a professional setup using specific roles and their abilities to play off of each other and create a unique game experience, or you could open up a 30 player public lobby with a bunch of batshit insane roles and either attempt to play seriously or fail miserably when your setup is horribly unbalanced and your playerbase prefers shitposting, and to be real with you I've always been more of a shitposter than a professional. Didn't stop me from getting invited to multiple closed professional mafia.gg servers over a game where I got too in-character as the Principal from Love Live and somehow won the game. I barely joined in on their games since they were too organized for my dipped in seven layers of irony ass, but I appreciated it. Any mafia game with over 30 players is borderline unplayable by the way. Like you know how I said you can get weapons like guns that can just instantly kill someone and remove them from the game. Imagine like 15 of these in play at a time.There isn’t really a way to analyze statements to determine who’s suspicious when everyone’s getting shot or stabbed left and right. It’s hilarious.
There were also decks of copyrighted intellectual properties you could use, so instead of being WarioTheLegend I was Nagito Komaeda, or Huffin Puffin from Yoshi’s Island, or a random obscure sandwich I had never heard of but was still playing as because the public lobbies picked bad decks. This is probably the most roleplay experience I've had, and the site honestly became less fun and charming when No Deck (everyone is just their username) became the dominant deck in pubs. This combined with a dwindling player base and the fact I now have better things to do now, both productive and unproductive, are how mafia.gg left my daily routine just as fast as it became a part of it. They also never added A Hat in Time as a deck, I always wanted it due to that game having the mafia in it, and the Mafia of Cooks were a de facto mascot for the Discord Mafia sessions briefly. It was perfect.
I've rambled on long enough about mafia.gg, and while I almost never play it these days I still have a lot of fond memories playing the game. I'll cap off this review sharing some of the funniest most iconic mafia.gg moments I've experienced.
- Goro Akechi from Persona 5 was a gigantic meme with the Discord crew due to how often he would turn up as sided with the mafia. Because of what kind of role Akechi serves in Persona 5 and the parallels that can be found in a game where you have to uncover who in your group is sided with an enemy faction, this made the joke extra funny. It got to the point where the cop (or someone who wasn't even cop, just looking to stir shit) would claim "cop here, Akechi sided," whoever got Akechi would get voted out or shot instantly, and the game would be called there.
- Big Iron
- Game on the Star Fox themed deck, no one knew any Star Fox characters beyond the ones in Smash so I googled a bunch of them and copy pasted their wiki articles in the game chat. Got about 3 textwalls in before getting shot, with Wolf telling me “Google that, you dick.”
- At the time I did not know who Seto Kaiba was and I was playing as him, I said "Go Fish" as a response to the entire chat begging me to say my iconic line and was shot right there.
- https://twitter.com/CreaksTweets/status/1224129463731908608?s=20
- A late night small mafia game going normally until the website announces it will imminently be going under maintenance. The players freak out.
- "The Donkey Kong Game"
- Jailer was a fan favorite role with the public lobbies, mostly because its gimmick only functioned if town chose to vote for nobody. If town voted "no one" as their kill for the day, Jailer could choose whatever player it wanted, interrogate them privately at night, and kill them if they and they ALONE thought the player was suspicious. It effectively allowed town to get away with not playing the game, just saying "ah let the jailer handle it" letting whoever landed this role have complete control over someone's fate. The pros HATED this role and it became a meme because it allowed players to coast instead of actually playing the game and deducing who acts suspicious during the day. One time I got jailed, jailer gave me a 3 second countdown to reveal my role and instantly voted me guilty before i could send my message saying I was governor, a strong town role which the mafia can't lie about being (if anyone fake claims this governor can just hijack the vote and kill them instead) Good game design.
- The Jojo's Bizarre Adventure deck
-The time where people would open rooms not to play the game, but to intentionally stall and break the record for amount of in-game days the game would last. There were two rooms doing this at the same time and they formed somewhat of a rivalry.
- With 3 players remaining, Donkey Kong the mafia and Dragonlord the manipulator had both figured out each other's roles. Unfortunately the deciding vote and last remaining town member was AFK. Instead of sitting there for ten minutes waiting for time to end the game, the two settled it by playing Rock Paper Scissors in the game chat, and the loser let the winner win the game.
- One game where I claimed manipulator as a joke, implicated five people as the mafia and claimed I had a flat tire as my excuse to leaving. Three of my guesses were correct.
- That one game with a 4 grandma 2 jekyll setup, a professional setup enforcing non traditional rules to the game. No one knew what they were doing, so we all just roleplayed
as grandmas and played bingo.
- A user was causing problems with the spectator chat for god knows what, and after getting booted from the lobby rejoined with an alt claiming to be the kid's brother. They started arguing in their "brother's" defense about why they should be unbanned or whatever until a completely different person logged on with an alt claiming to be their father. Chaos ensued, eventually someone else came in with a mother account and only made things worse. Mafia has an "AFK check" due to how problematic AFK users are, where everyone is turned back into a spectator and has to hit the ready button again. I only ever missed one AFK check and was forced to spectate the game, and it just so happened to be this fucking game.
This website is also near single handedly responsible for getting me interested in the Danganronpa franchise and familiar with its cast of characters, for better or for worse.
I first came across mafia.gg when a Smash Bros. summit was holding a game of mafia and having top Smash professionals play the game in real life. These streams inspired a Discord server I frequent and we were looking for some way we could all play mafia together. Eventually we stumbled upon mafia.gg thinking "hey, this might work." Sure enough, it did, and after a few rounds, everyone was hooked, making mafia.gg a regular occurrence for the server near the end of 2019 up through the first few months of 2020. Prior to this, the server never really had a game that everyone played besides Smash Bros. and the height of mafia.gg there (alongside Jackbox when it became the big thing in the months after mafia.gg died down) was the most unity that server ever experienced. Considering it was a server heavily tied to Smash leaks and speculation, a very easy way to get heated, there were a lot of incidents, users that just held disdain towards each other and dragged down the server's quality of life, etc. This game being able to bring the server together and effectively lay the groundwork for another Discord community (the ex mafia/jackbox players who got tired of the Smash Bros. speculation and moved to their own place) that's still active to this day is pretty admirable.
Eventually I started dabbling into the public lobbies, and they were an experience. Most of the mafia.gg crowd from Discord did not enjoy playing the game in public with randos, but I have low standards and the public games were typically much larger and able to go more in-depth with the sites mechanics than our at most 10 player games that eventually struggled to get more than 3 people interested. Mafia.gg effectively became the backbone of my 2020. If I needed something to do, I'd go to the website, check out some of the public lobbies, and hope for the worst.
As for the actual game itself, Mafia.gg follows the endless battle between the town and the mafia, where the mafia will kill a player every night, and then in the day act like innocent town members while the town has to deduce who the mafia members are. It was basically a text based version of Among Us before Among Us was cool, but it also had roles (before Among Us had roles) that could give the town or a mafia member unique attributes. Some examples of roles include
-The cop being able to check someone each night to see if they were sided with the mafia
-The doctor being able to protect a town member from being killed at night from the mafia
-The arms dealer being able to give random people guns which you could use to end someone's fucking life on the whim of a simple button press if they were suspicious or made a meme you didn't find funny
-abilities to fuck with the cops report
-roles that just announced mafia members to EVERYONE out of nowhere
-roles that could suicide bomb, killing themselves alongside another player of their choice
-a whole ass fucking CULT separate from both town and mafia that they had to worry about before cult absorbed most of the players
-the Manipulator, who if the mafia wins, goes "fuck you actually I win instead" if they survive the game, you get the idea.
There were so many roles capable of creating engaging gameplay mechanics or chaos, almost always the latter, that other social deceit games were never quite able to replicate. You could have a standard game with a few villagers, a few mafias, a cop and a doc, you could craft a professional setup using specific roles and their abilities to play off of each other and create a unique game experience, or you could open up a 30 player public lobby with a bunch of batshit insane roles and either attempt to play seriously or fail miserably when your setup is horribly unbalanced and your playerbase prefers shitposting, and to be real with you I've always been more of a shitposter than a professional. Didn't stop me from getting invited to multiple closed professional mafia.gg servers over a game where I got too in-character as the Principal from Love Live and somehow won the game. I barely joined in on their games since they were too organized for my dipped in seven layers of irony ass, but I appreciated it. Any mafia game with over 30 players is borderline unplayable by the way. Like you know how I said you can get weapons like guns that can just instantly kill someone and remove them from the game. Imagine like 15 of these in play at a time.There isn’t really a way to analyze statements to determine who’s suspicious when everyone’s getting shot or stabbed left and right. It’s hilarious.
There were also decks of copyrighted intellectual properties you could use, so instead of being WarioTheLegend I was Nagito Komaeda, or Huffin Puffin from Yoshi’s Island, or a random obscure sandwich I had never heard of but was still playing as because the public lobbies picked bad decks. This is probably the most roleplay experience I've had, and the site honestly became less fun and charming when No Deck (everyone is just their username) became the dominant deck in pubs. This combined with a dwindling player base and the fact I now have better things to do now, both productive and unproductive, are how mafia.gg left my daily routine just as fast as it became a part of it. They also never added A Hat in Time as a deck, I always wanted it due to that game having the mafia in it, and the Mafia of Cooks were a de facto mascot for the Discord Mafia sessions briefly. It was perfect.
I've rambled on long enough about mafia.gg, and while I almost never play it these days I still have a lot of fond memories playing the game. I'll cap off this review sharing some of the funniest most iconic mafia.gg moments I've experienced.
- Goro Akechi from Persona 5 was a gigantic meme with the Discord crew due to how often he would turn up as sided with the mafia. Because of what kind of role Akechi serves in Persona 5 and the parallels that can be found in a game where you have to uncover who in your group is sided with an enemy faction, this made the joke extra funny. It got to the point where the cop (or someone who wasn't even cop, just looking to stir shit) would claim "cop here, Akechi sided," whoever got Akechi would get voted out or shot instantly, and the game would be called there.
- Big Iron
- Game on the Star Fox themed deck, no one knew any Star Fox characters beyond the ones in Smash so I googled a bunch of them and copy pasted their wiki articles in the game chat. Got about 3 textwalls in before getting shot, with Wolf telling me “Google that, you dick.”
- At the time I did not know who Seto Kaiba was and I was playing as him, I said "Go Fish" as a response to the entire chat begging me to say my iconic line and was shot right there.
- https://twitter.com/CreaksTweets/status/1224129463731908608?s=20
- A late night small mafia game going normally until the website announces it will imminently be going under maintenance. The players freak out.
- "The Donkey Kong Game"
- Jailer was a fan favorite role with the public lobbies, mostly because its gimmick only functioned if town chose to vote for nobody. If town voted "no one" as their kill for the day, Jailer could choose whatever player it wanted, interrogate them privately at night, and kill them if they and they ALONE thought the player was suspicious. It effectively allowed town to get away with not playing the game, just saying "ah let the jailer handle it" letting whoever landed this role have complete control over someone's fate. The pros HATED this role and it became a meme because it allowed players to coast instead of actually playing the game and deducing who acts suspicious during the day. One time I got jailed, jailer gave me a 3 second countdown to reveal my role and instantly voted me guilty before i could send my message saying I was governor, a strong town role which the mafia can't lie about being (if anyone fake claims this governor can just hijack the vote and kill them instead) Good game design.
- The Jojo's Bizarre Adventure deck
-The time where people would open rooms not to play the game, but to intentionally stall and break the record for amount of in-game days the game would last. There were two rooms doing this at the same time and they formed somewhat of a rivalry.
- With 3 players remaining, Donkey Kong the mafia and Dragonlord the manipulator had both figured out each other's roles. Unfortunately the deciding vote and last remaining town member was AFK. Instead of sitting there for ten minutes waiting for time to end the game, the two settled it by playing Rock Paper Scissors in the game chat, and the loser let the winner win the game.
- One game where I claimed manipulator as a joke, implicated five people as the mafia and claimed I had a flat tire as my excuse to leaving. Three of my guesses were correct.
- That one game with a 4 grandma 2 jekyll setup, a professional setup enforcing non traditional rules to the game. No one knew what they were doing, so we all just roleplayed
as grandmas and played bingo.
- A user was causing problems with the spectator chat for god knows what, and after getting booted from the lobby rejoined with an alt claiming to be the kid's brother. They started arguing in their "brother's" defense about why they should be unbanned or whatever until a completely different person logged on with an alt claiming to be their father. Chaos ensued, eventually someone else came in with a mother account and only made things worse. Mafia has an "AFK check" due to how problematic AFK users are, where everyone is turned back into a spectator and has to hit the ready button again. I only ever missed one AFK check and was forced to spectate the game, and it just so happened to be this fucking game.
This website is also near single handedly responsible for getting me interested in the Danganronpa franchise and familiar with its cast of characters, for better or for worse.