Mafia Championships 2018

People can and do take these silly bluffing games way to seriously.

To each their own. I'm in love with serious mafia even if I suck at it, and simplifying mafia down to "a silly bluffing game" is the same sort of reductionism that leads to, say, video games being treated like they're "just for kids" or, on the other side of the spectrum, "just mindless violent sinful things".

I really enjoy taking the concept of "you don't know who's bad and who's good" to its extreme. Baseline, that's already the plot of, say, mystery novels, which you'd be hard pressed to call entirely silly, even if there are some that have more fun with it than hard-boiled seriousness.

edit: Also, pseudonyms are great! Even online, you can set up a forum with some pseudonym usernames for everyone and keep that meta stuff out of it. One of my favorite casual mafia groups had a much more serious version that did exactly that.