Every year, around 40 students involved with Maryland Hillel come together to play Mafia, a social deduction game based on secrecy, “murder” and strategy.
“I think it’s pretty similar to the Mafia that most kids end up playing when they’re young in camp, synagogue, or other youth groups—just with a lot more roles and a lot more teams,” said Mia Cohen, a sophomore computer science major and moderator of this year’s game.
Hillel’s Mafia has been around for approximately 20 years, with a few gaps in between, according to moderator Noah Hamermesh, a junior conservation biology and cello performance double major. The annual Hillel Mafia game has been revived in the past few years. Every year has a theme, and this year’s theme was historical eras. Each “Family” was assigned an era: Renaissance, Dark Ages, Mesozoic Era, Industrial Era and Bronze Age. Planning for the game starts in fall and the game is played during the spring.
The game involves two teams, the “Families” and the “Mafia.” Each Family contains about eight or 10 players, with one or two of them being Mafia members, respectively. Family members’ goals are to find out who is part of the Mafia, before they “kill” everyone. The goal for Mafia members is to “keep as many Mafia members alive as possible,” which involves “killing” their Family members before they’re found out.
The game is separated between Day and Night, with built-in buffer time for moderators to look over what happened and send morning and evening announcements of “deaths, resurrections and arrests.” These “flavor texts,” are tailored to the person it’s written about.
Mia Cohen said that this year, moderators tried to strike a balance between placing people with friends they requested to play with, and with people who play with the same level of intensity. She said she doesn’t want to make the intense players be in the same Family as those who have a more relaxed approach, saying enthusiastic players “are going to feel like no one’s matching their energy.”
It’s a requirement for current moderators to have played the game at Hillel before applying for the position. Part of their job is to take players’ feedback and update the rules from the previous year’s game. This year, one new rule was that if a player impersonated others using Google Forms (which happened previously), you would be banned from the game.
With the game lasting less than a week, participants in Hillel Mafia play with determination and vigor, finding ways to add chaos. They strategize to maximize their chances of winning the game.
“People don’t get to play this [kind of Mafia] very often, so when they can, they want to play to make it count,” Hamermesh said.
Uriel Appel, a sophomore transfer student enrolled in letters and sciences, said one of his favorite parts of the game is “piecing together the whole picture.” Him and his Family met for hours one night and made a “murder board,” trying to figure out players’ roles. His role was Witness, so he received randomized lists of information about those who died.
People are secretive about what happens during the game. During the interview, Appel shut a room in Hillel’s door and closed the room divider, fearing fellow players would overhear him talk about the game.
Eric Stearns, a junior electrical engineering major, found the game’s intensity “thrilling.”
“Though it is very scary and stressful, [it’s] a good kind of scary and stressful,” he said about trying not to get killed as a Mafia member.
As to why people play with such intensity, he struck it up to the “separate meta game” that happens within Mafia. Families want their team to do the best, but they also want to kill the Mafia.
“A big part of why we as the Mafia won this year was because each team was trying very hard to sabotage each other,” he said.
Although Mafia is intense, it’s still somewhat niche within Maryland Hillel. Hamermesh said in the last three years, the game has barely reached the 40-person minimum needed to play. This year, they sent out the announcements to various Hillel organizations’ WhatsApp group chats and a Facebook group. Hamermesh and Michael Chernak, another moderator, went as far as door-knocking in off-campus apartment buildings commonly lived in by Jewish students, trying to encourage students to play.
Although it might have a smaller fanbase, it is still enjoyable for players. Stearns said playing this year brought him closer to Hillel, and he was able to talk to people he usually doesn’t talk to.
Appel said the game “adds another layer to Hillel” and the sad events that have happened recently. “And I think in previous years, it was just kind of a fun community activity,” he added.
“It’s a fun thing that brings people closer together,” Stearns said.
