Secret History of Kubo Mafia
As some of the vets may have noticed, this game was related to my prior series of Ender's Game blitz games -- 8 players with 3 mafia and a generally quick win for one side or the other. I started out wanting to design a small game, and it just ended up following those old games's footsteps.
I really wanted to have players die and come back as Monkey and Beetle. Making them lovers made sense flavorwise (especially the fact that they don't know each other) and so that happened. I had everyone with flavor names early on, but that went away quickly when I realized just how closely tied the roles were to the flavor names. It was easy enough to provide fake names for scum, but it was entirely too ICish to have the Bodyguard be Monkey and so on. So the flavor names got reduced.
Until the very late stages of design, The Moon King had the same death clause as Kubo (i.e., if he died, town won immediately). That was partly because Beetle was originally a Captained Vigilante, where Kubo could aim him (but become Macho for the night). Eventually, I had to admit to myself I was being unnecessarily complicated, and unless town knew killing the Moon King meant win, there was no reason for the shots to ever happen.
3 scum in an 8 player game is really, really tough for town. Like, really. And so the win condition for scum had to change to ensure we had two full days. Plus the lovers coming back to life, assuming they could draw the night kill, allowed for basically two more ICs to be made.
When I said this was advanced, I didn't really mean the setup. None of the roles is complicated. Nothing too out of the ordinary, really. Instead, you could see that most roles were written with an optimal strategy in mind, but not guaranteed. The Lovers need to realize early on that they MUST draw the NK. It activates their powers, surely, but it also takes the shot away from the Warden, who is the real important role here (keeping Kubo alive). Given Kubo is named, everyone needs to assume there are ways to protect Kubo, and if you aren't one of those ways, you need to realize you have to keep them from dying. So the Lovers want to be NKed for many reasons.
The Warden (basically JK) and Deputy are there as Kubo protection. The 1-Shot Roleblock that scum has is the lottery ticket for them -- block the right person AND shoot Kubo and win. I think generally the optimal play for scum is to try to win through killing everyone else. If you lynch one Warden and kill the other, well, game over and good luck, and shame on those town players.
The Whisper -- I keep including this ability in my games hoping the player who gets it will really use it well. Still hasn't really happened. When players can open QTs with others, it can often lead to great mafia, but for some reason mailmen aren't as effective.
I want this to be an open set-up. It probably needs a White Flag mechanism in there, or it will be scum-favored, I think. But I think there is potential here to make it a true RMM Open Setup.