Hey all,
In case anyone is looking for another option for playing, I'd like to recommend the
BoardGameGeek Werewolf forums (Werewolf is just a rethemed version of Mafia.) I've been playing on those boards for the past 5 years and the style of games there is definitely unique and stands out from other Mafia forums I've seen.
* The games tend to be one cycle per day (except for extremely complex games) so there's a lot of action all the time, and things will generally be more fresh on your memory than the longer cycles I usually see elsewhere, although it does mean you have to commit to posting a few times per weekday (games generally go on hiatus over weekends).
* The style of the general rolesets tends to differ; BGG Werewolf games both because of the mechanics and because of the players tend to place higher emphasis on strategy and analysis than most other sites, although tone reads are very important too.
* Most importantly, we have an external system that monitors the forum that we connect and archive all our games with, which allows some extremely complex games, and also helps a lot with even simple games. All game information, from the posts and votes that people make, to private chats, special virtual items and locations and role information, is stored in a database, and some of that is publicly accessible to players in a game in order to help them track what is going on. Every "standard" game automatically is set up to give each player a private chatroom with the moderator, the wolves (mafia) a private chatroom with each other, and track and post regular updates to the game thread the status of who is voting for whom at all times.
It looks like two basic/newbie friendly games just started, but if any of you are interested I could easily start another up for people here.
