Subotan

So what's so special about this particular mafia game?

ABZF has many influences taken from mafia games, and some totally new inventions of my own. Since I want to keep you all interested, I won't reveal them all today, but I will reveal two of them. The first is a totally brand new mechanic regarding kills, in that the orders must specify the weaponry used to kill your victim. For example, if the KMT decided to assasinate the noble revolutionary Subotan, then they would send their orders in as so:

Chris, Rob, Anthony and Paul will kill Subotan, using knives.

But, Subotan may have certain bonuses allocated to him in his role PM, such as having a 66% chance of survival if he is attacked with knives. The player's weakness will be revealed through investigation, and although this is not a particularly critical new mechanism, as only a minority of players will have these bonuses, it will allow the players to have some input into the write-up and help me be a little more imaginative.

And the other?

The other mechanism allows players to be promoted to positions of importance within Lenin Company, giving them bonuses and political influence. As the wars in China were as much political struggles as military struggles, I wouldn't be able to do them justice without having some sort of leadership mechanism. So, at the start of the game all of the players elect a Chairman. This Chairman, in addition to have some particular abilities, gets to choose an officer corps who will serve under him. This officer corps consists of four seperate roles, the Secretary of Defence, the Commissar of Anti-Revolutionary Activties, the Enforcer of Retribution and the Director of Proletarian Justice (N.B. Subotan reserves the right to change cheesy names without prior notice). These roles all have particular abilties which should be used to help or hinder the town, depending on the alignment of the officers and the Chairman.

Wait, so the mafias can infiltrate the leadership?

Yep. Luckily, there's a mechanism to remove them if they're discovered, through a Revolution. But you've still got to be careful.

This sounds very similar to that mafia game a few months back...you know, that one about the criminals who stole stuff using boats?

You mean GH's Pirate Ship Mafia? Alright, I admit, PSM is my main influence, if GH lets me use his ideas. This is because it was the only mafia game I had played when I first came up with the idea of ABZF, and I also found it very entertaining. Numerous features of PSM will be incorporated into ABZF, (Although not all of them will be, and there will be many new ones).