Mafia (Party Game); From Camaraderie to App- Excellent Team Building!
Long ago, there was a town named Pune and there was a creative agency in it called PugMarker.
Just like any other creative agency…
.
.
Nope! We are not just like any other creative agency.
This is not a typical blog but more of a story.
Don’t you just love the word camaraderie? The only time when we praise our HRs is when they arrange fun activities where we hang out with our teammates, we play, we laugh, and whatnot!
One fine evening, we all decided to play Friday Fun. Gaurav, our Sr. UX Designer introduced an indoor game called ‘Mafia’ (party game). When he narrated the game, we all got excited & a bit confused because a lot happens in one game of Mafia. Literally! When we started playing, we played for hours! Everybody started getting calls from their homes to get back home. You can imagine how fun was our Friday Fun @PugMarker!
Before getting to the exciting part of this story, let me tell you how to play Mafia (Party Game).
So there is a big group of people. One person is assigned the job of a God. All other players are assigned cards where they get their identities. There are a few villagers, a few mafias, 1 police, 1 doctor, 1 priest, 1 silencer, 1 bomber, 1 assassin, 1 little girl, etc.
So the deal is like this; God asks everyone to close their eyes in the nighttime (hypothetical night) and then asks only Mafias to open their eyes. Now Mafias will team up silently and pick anyone from that imaginary village to kill. After the Mafia, the doctor gets to open his eyes and save any random person that night.
Similarly, the police in his turn get to suspect anyone and God confirms if he is the Mafia or a false alarm. In the morning, everybody opens their eyes, and everyone has to discuss (the funniest part) and think about who can be the Mafia. After discussion, voting happens and one player gets voted out. Mafias bluff to stay alive and villagers struggle to kill Mafias. Those who are good at bluffing will enjoy the game like no one!
We started playing the game every Friday. Soon we realized a few challenges. Whoever becomes God, has to write everything. He has to keep in mind who all are playing, who are the Mafias, who are the villagers, who got killed in the night, who got saved by the Priest & Doctor, who got voted out, etc.
That was when Gaurav & our CTO Nishit thought of developing a system for Mafia (party game); a web app.
The primary challenge that encouraged this idea was the difficulty of God handling everything. Soon the two found multiple opportunities to make the game more interesting. The game is simple and easy to play, whoever the God is, can manage the task with no hassle, and the UI is excellent. Human psychology plays a vital role in the Mafia game. The entire design & development of the ‘simple’ game is not so simple. Hence, our team members decided to skip the Mafia online gaming function and keep it an offline game.
The reason why they have kept this app a Progressive Web App is to eliminate the need of downloading it and engaging space in the mobile. The way this app is built to facilitate the God in Mafia game, PugMarker also has a giant version of Mafia game app; a task management system called Collabiro where management of large organizations can track the work progress of their teams and can also analyze the KPIs! We will talk about this later in detail. But if you are curious about Collabiro, check this out Collabiro work
Coming back to Mafia game, the best part is, this is not just an app that facilitates God. The thought process behind the app is to bring back the joy of people sitting together, enjoying a good time with friends, playing a fun game, and creating memories instead of spending more time on smartphones.
In the future, Nishit & Gaurav are also planning to use Bluetooth for eliminating the card system.
I have played the role of God multiple times and I loved the app. You have to check it out! Mafia game
PugMarker is really proud of our team; Gaurav & Nishit. Now that you know how to play Mafia game, let us know in the comment section about your camaraderie experience.
Cheers!