Introduction:
Mafia is a competitive game of the informed minority vs the uninformed majority, one where there is a winning team and a losing team. I’ve seen a lot of players be completely stressed out or overwhelmed when they see that they’ve rolled Mafia, so I’m going to go over some tricks and plays that I believe will help you be more consistent with your game on the Red team, so you don’t have to feel as stressed out and super anxious just by seeing the dreaded Red Role PM. And that’s what I’ll be referring to the Mafia team in this guide, the Red Team, because while the standard flavor might be Good Guys vs Bad Guys, the game itself is Team Green vs Team Red, and while this should seem obvious, a lot of times I feel it gets forgotten, and because of it, people always feel offended when someone reads them as Red, when that shouldn't be the case in a competitive game. It's the Red Team's job to make Green Team seem Red. This is meant to be somewhat of an introduction to Playing As Red guide, there is a fantastically high skill cap that you can build upon these bases.
Qualifications:
While I might not be the best writer of guides, I feel I’m at least qualified enough to give some tips and general insight based on my general play and win consistency playing for the Red team, and based on my own views on how Mafia should play. In the year 2019, I won 10 Red Team games on site, assisting to my receiving the Don Corleone Scummy Award, the award for Best Overall Performance as Mafia, which whether you care about that or not, at least shows that some people see my potential capabilities as a Mafia player, I feel like a lot of people think that I have an incredibly unorthodox Red team style, but I actually feel that my play itself is pretty standard, solid on a technical level, and that I’m just unorthodox as a person, so these tips and plays will hopefully be able to help you in a way that relates to how you play. I spent a lot of time playing as an IC in the Newbie Queue when that was around alongside a vast experience in face to face Mafia with new players, and successfully modding games for years, Normal, Large Themes, Event style games, and Experimental.
#1 - Take Action:
You need to
Take Action
. I’ve been teammates with a lot of new players receiving their first Red victory, and one of the biggest things I see that newer Mafia players is complete lack of action. They’re just existing, hoping that town self destructs. Which yes, this can happen, and yes, you can play the sit back and watch game, but to do this consistently and successfully a majority of time is not easy, you might be playing against a group of players that naturally aren’t going to let that happen, and I don’t believe this style should ever be your go to unless perfected.You can get lucky, yes, but I feel like this style is like a character in a video game that’s naturally harder to play than the rest of the characters. You might be able to beat someone else when you're both new, but at a higher level, you’re going to need to know how to play that obscure character to do well.
Someone I believe can do this extremely well is Mastina, and the reason she can do this so well is because their technical play and vast Mafia Theory knowledge is a strength of theirs. She can do this because even while not actively participating, she can identify threats to the Red Team’s victory, and take action, and essentially build a verbal roadblock to keep the game running smoothly. This leads me into my next point where I’ll explain into more detail about taking action throughout.
#2 - Teamwork!
A lot of times players will acknowledge each other as teammates, but don’t really play as such. Animals U-Pick, I believe the opposite happened.
The Red Team was Myself on my April Ludgate stealth alt, Mastina, Chemist, and Votato. The group of us didn’t really acknowledge ourselves as a team, and it almost felt like we were going to be a group of individuals playing for the Red Team, and then Votato started going down on Day 1 because of not covering each other’s backs, and him not being able to hold his own.
This changed, as instead of individual players, we were forced to directly confront our teammate going down or be at a great disadvantage going forward with the loss of his powerful 1-shot ability.
I’m going to recap the game from my perspective of how it all went down, and most of these weren’t even talked about with each other, we just were able to ebb and flow incredibly well in the arena of the game thread itself based on knowing that we could go after each other pretty hard and the other would be able to handle it. Learning to successfully harness the ebb and flow between yourself and teammate smoothly is synergy. Synergy wins games.
Day 1
Mastina takes action by actively pushing Votato, and starts coming across as one of the main people pushing him, which will help her when he flips Red, setting her up for some major Town Clout, and I take action as well, by actively defending Votato. I know that sounds like a giant risk, but it’s not that big of a risk at the end of the day, unless Votato flips right in that moment, and it isn’t actually that hard to pull off successfully.
Actively pushing against the status quo
will
get you noticed. It will become a topic of discussion because action
is ripe for discussion. Because this goes directly against partner Mastina, it actively means we are on a collision course, which allows us to setup how the overall Game Narrative
portrays us. We are now able to push each other as hard as we can because I can take pressure off of Votato by attracting it to myself, and Mastina gets a fantastic reason to focus on pushing me instead of Votato, and allows players to change direction after loss of interest in Votato, and the circular reasoning of Day 1 making it impossible to actively get momentum on either Mastina or Myself based on the ability we have to relieve pressure off of ourselves when we need to because we don’t actually want each other executed. I'm not even sure if this happened on that direct a path, but the words are written on the wall to be able to use later regardless. This also opens up to pounce on unguarded townies to get through the day with everyone alive, especially with the help of Chemist, our other teammate, who can help put pressure outside of us which adds to other wagons gaining momentum, and we’re able to use Votato’s 1 shot ability at night.
Day 2
I can’t defend Votato anymore or I’m going to go down as well, and it’s clear that if he doesn’t have anyone to defend him, he’s going down, so to position both Mastina and Myself, I claim a guilty on Votato. With Votato not having any night abilities left, and the clout that Mastina gains on his flip combo’d with him not being able to survive without Teammate Defense, Votato’s death does more for the team than him staying alive ever would. He flips Red this day, and the overall Game Narrative evolves. We have successfully established two strong pieces of Game Fiction, or
Gamefic
.This makes it so we can push each other in an anti associative manner, and have strong reasons for us to come across as Team Green.
Every player has a stake in the game, let’s say metaphorically they’re wooden stakes physically positioned into the ground. Whether you like it or not, you are tied to your teammates, so you need to position your stakes and help fortify your way to being able to take out all the Green Stakes. Even though we lost a member of our Red Team, we came out of it positioned far superior than before, which let us run wild for a bit. I did take a couple incredibly high risks, like claiming a guilty on Votato in a way where I could technically be caught out as lying based on a different kill flavor being used than the one Votato flipped with, but I knew a strength of mine is being able to use things like that to my advantage, and start actively abusing Setup Spec, like theory crafting or possible balancing of games that can allow more possibilities happening in the game.
I found in Mod Krazy’s rules something about Kill Flavors potentially being able to change, and this brought us into believing that a flavor changing role must be on the Red Team. Abusing Setup Spec was one of the main reasons I feel we were able to position as well as we did and take out players who were mechanically incredibly likely to be town. Because of knowing there was a role blocker, Myself, I was able to use the claim I made on Votato to get a correct check on another player by abusing the informed minority knowledge to help give my claim even more credibility.
The game eventually got to a point where Mastina and I were essentially locked into being on opposite sides, and our support Chemist got linked together with Mastina, so when one of them got guilted they both went down, however because of the proper positioning done by them, Mastina dying helped insure our victory by giving another couple lines of Game Fic.
Gamefic 3 happened after Gamefic 4, but because of the flips, it retroactively assists Gamefic 4 to becoming more trustworthy.
The game becomes a game of all these players who have reasons to be town, so because everybody has a reason to be town, this is doubt ridden. This is how you can get around allowing games to be mechanically cleared eventually, by creating reasons for yourself to be town. This establishes doubt on the Green Team.
When we got to the final 3, both of the Green Team cross voted each other. This happened so seamlessly because we as a team literally played the game together, even if a lot of it was going after each other, we identified threats, fortified our defenses, and established doubt within the Green Team for a game I feel was an incredibly solid victory that was only possible because of the combination of the positioning of all 4 members of our team.
I didn’t talk about Chemist much here, but he played a fantastic support game where he would pressure to add momentum where necessary at the cost of not being able to come across as Green as he would have liked.
Now I know this had a lot of high risk because that’s the type of player I am, I take a lot of strong action, whereas Mastina plays the style I mentioned earlier incredibly well, which allowed me to take even stronger action because she was always able to begrudgingly keep the game grounded while Chemist went along helping both of us. And that’s kind of the point. This was 100% a team effort. I have had games where I’ve had perfect victories that were as no way as clean as this one, because a lot of games that are perfect victories require it to be a perfect victory, because in certain situations, one unprotected flip can open up the game for a Green Victory.
#3 - Social Dynamics:
At the end of the day, this is a social game. Everything that happens when the game starts should be seen as something that is going to further push the game towards your wincon.
You need to establish tangible connections with other players in the game to help with your own personal agency alongside building systems that work for themselves within the game. Players have a tendency to start building this connections, but never really doing anything with them. They kind of hope that they just work out for themselves, and they can. That’s a good beginning step, but you can help, let’s call it, level these connections up through different strategies.
Play to the players in the game. It doesn't matter if people in the dead thread can see you as Red, they are dead. The players not playing the game do not matter either. This, however, is why replacements suck, and you run the risk of a replacement coming in and screwing you over, but that's an issue that annoyingly is a problem, unavoidably. If you can help keep the game fun, it diminishes the amount of replacements for the game thus keeping the players you are playing front and center.
Early Game
A lot of people like to throw the early game as a basic nonsense nothing matters RVS RVS RVS. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The beginning of the game is the time to establish the Dynamics of the Overstall Gamestate. You need to find allies, not only in ways to protect yourself, but in ways that can help you and your teammates reach your wincon. A lot of people naturally do this with their buddies, but this is a slippery slope. While this can be incredibly powerful, you run the risk of someone familiar with you as a player figuring out they’ve been getting played and completely flipping on you, rendering your entire play destroyed.
#4 - Pocketing:
Everyone’s aware of what pocketing is, but there’s a lot of different types and usages of pocketing.
It’s no secret I like to make up my own terms to verbalize specific plays happening in the game. A lot of plays are made subconsciously, but I think it’s important to know why they work, so I’m going to list off and explain some basic moves you probably are already doing, but could probably maximize their effectiveness.
In the Pants Pocket:
You need to pick who you want to pocket, at least have an idea of why it will benefit your team moreso than just “I can get this player to like me”.
Warlocking:
You can then either turn on them, or continue to defend them, and you can have your teammates push the player you Warlocked, and when they flip Green, that’s good for you. There is potential for this to backfire, pocketing will always have risk involved, but this also opens up nights for you to deal with threats to your plan.
Guardian Angel:
Vanilla Pet or the Best Bud:
Neighborhoods are EXTREMELY powerful to achieve this kind of pocket.
In a game from years back, I was in a Red Team where we neighborized ourselves, making it so we had 2 Red Team members in a neighborhood with nobody else. We then brought a quiet more null player into the neighborhood, and when we got to the Final 7 with 3 Red Team Members, it didn’t matter if the other players on the Green Team knew we were Red, we had the one vote we needed based on the pocket.
A risk of this is the better you can pocket someone, the more of a chance you’ll start to feel Mafia Guilt. This becomes extremely noticeable as the game progresses, and is another reason why I feel Mafia needs to be considered more Green Team vs Red Team competing because you shouldn’t feel bad for playing the game to win. Yes, there is a line you can cross, but that usually is only when using personal reasons rather than game related reasons.
There’s many more, and you can obviously mix and match, and evolve as you see fit. It’s a spectrum. When picking pockets, look for what can help your team overall, and how you can secure your lives with it.
#5 - Offensive Defense:
You can simultaneously push offensive pushes with defensive tactics. Everyone’s heard of Chainsawing, and it’s an amazing play for Red Team. There’s plenty of variations, and they setup hard action in the game.
Chainsaw:
2 Red Team Member votes on the same player is incredibly powerful, because if you get another player to join, that’s almost half the required votes to kill them off, not to mention you might be able to pivot completely and start momentum building on somebody who reacted poorly to the entire situation.
Hatcheting:
This is powerful because you are naturally protected due to the fact you didn’t push that player, yet they are incredibly weakened and discredited. If you can do this successfully and consistently, you can deal with high level threats and chop chop chop their ability to build any sort of momentum, almost without being noticed. It also can make them come off as Red if they begin to push you, and your partner who they were pushing naturally gets to push them alongside you because the player will have a hard time getting people to follow them, especially if it's still in the early-mid game.
Seducing:
The combination of these tactics being used by multiple different areas of your Red Team will help control momentum throughout the game, and almost force wagons to begin without even being a part of the wagon. This is how you get wagons with all town on them.
#6 - Abusing Setup Spec and Gamestate:
As the Red Team, you want the game to be as open ended as possible. This relates to closed games moreso than Open. By actively allowing and pushing Setup Spec and Theories, there is a much more possible chance of being able to survive and not having confirmed or basically confirmed Green players. You need to notice what’s happening in the game.
As the uninformed minority, you know more than anyone else in the game, so you can see relationships building between the town. You need to get in there. Don’t just allow townies to sit there and pick each other’s brains because that’s how strong town blocks are formed. If this means you need to force a discussion and take some heat to avoid it from happening, so be it.
You can use a combined effort to work on disrupting town blocks from taking place. Gamestate Manipulation at its finest.
Create the Gamefic.
You want those Recap Headlines to have reasons why you are Green. A lot of Mafia players don’t do this and hope that they just get enough executions go their way, but by the end of the game they risk being in a completely unenviable situation by not physically being able to pull off the necessary momentum late game. The more options available setup spec wise, the less likely town will put it together because Green wasn’t able to piece together the necessary solutions to the puzzle. You don’t need to convince the entire game you are Green.
It does not matter if people Red read you if they can’t build the momentum to kill you off.
You need to identify threats and come up with ways to take care of them. A lot of people pay attention to who Green are Red reading, pay attention to who they are reading as town as well, and disrupt this.
Beginning of days, watch how people are talking. Players like to crumb results at the beginning of days, and end of days, so reading carefully to posts around those times can help you find PR’s, and get one step ahead of them.
In Bins’ Ramblings, Vorkuta was a Red Complex Fruit Vendor, so only PR’s got Fruit. As Vorkuta’s partner, I faked a Disloyal Fruit Vendor on Something_Smart, who received a Fruit. We knew Something_Smart was a PR, and nobody else did because of it. Vorkuta then claimed to be the real reason for the fruit, which also meant that Smart didn’t get guilted, and it made it so we didn’t have to explain why he was Green. Then we town blocked with him heavily that day, got a nice execution, then killed him off. Identified the threat, set ourselves up to benefit, then dealt with it.
#7 - Fake Claiming, Gambits, and Misc:
Be self aware when it comes to the risk vs reward in combination with your personal play style. It takes time to realize when and where to gambit. When fake claiming, you need to set yourself up to not get caught out. Yes, you can take some risks that can pull off great, but you have to be ready to fight to protect yourself in that situation. Gambits are something that will become easily available to you after working on these skills, as these are the building blocks. Gambiting is the art form in which the paint you've chosen to create begins to become a picture.
Use your informed knowledge to your advantage. You know Mafia’s roles from the beginning, so you can somewhat see the type of setup that it’s going to be, and remember from your perspective, your role is ingrained into the setup, it should be considered a fact to you, and your play needs to match that.
It is incredibly powerful to support your teammates' fake claims. If you can get it setup into the general gamestate’s minds that a role makes sense in a game, you will likely be able to coast the entire game on it alone. When fake claiming, see who is the most suspicious, and then mix some of the techniques from above to take care of your threats. Think about who you want in all future day phases in the game, not just the final day phase. If you don’t want to directly kill off players targeting you, start killing off their support system. Kill off people that the Green side is rallying up. Control their momentum, build yours. This is how you take out strong players who you feel like you can’t just kill off. If you think you can get away with killing them off, I say do it, because it takes away the loudest voice and vote towards you.
Be aware of which players are more likely to target you, a lot of times this will be in players who are aware of your existence, but don’t quite have a read on you. Those are going to be the most dangerous because Investigative roles naturally like to target null reads so they don’t have to be null anymore. Use this knowledge to avoid Night Actions and optimize your own.
#8 - Meta:
I don't want to spend too much time here, but understand which players are familiar with you, how they are familiar with you, and play accordingly. This is when Mafia starts really getting fun for me. When you’re with players who are familiar with each other, and you actively have to play differently to avoid being caught. Making plays help with this. Your buddies might seem like good pocketing attempts, but they’re likely some of your biggest threats as well.
Conclusion:
If you read all that, I hope you were able to find something of use from it, if only to start seeing how I see playing as “The Bad Guys”. Honestly, a lot of these sections can be combined, as being able to do use these different types of play to your advantage fluidly is really when you'll start seeing consistent progress. I guarantee you do some of these, if not most of these, subconsciously, but being aware of why they work is essential in being able to ebb and flow and create a gamestate in which you can walk away with those clean victories. Thanks for taking the time to read it. I appreciate it, I hope that you never have to stress out from simply rolling a Red PM, I love Mafia and love talking theory and craft.
Moral of the story:
