Quote Originally Posted by Zim View Post
I've never had much interest in those games so this may be a silly question, but how important is it to have a certain number of players?
It depends on the game. The more complex the game, the more 'roles' the host has to create beforehand. Play balance is important to keep the game interesting, since it's not much fun if one team or another is handicapped before it even starts. Thus, hosts generally try and figure out an 'ideal' number of players so that they can properly balance the number of 'roles' on each side. If a game gets too few or too many players, this can cause scaling problems if it's not easy to re-arrange the roles. Many hosts anticipate this problem in advance and have provisions for various setups based on different levels of participation.

The 'Capo' series is somewhat unique. It's far and away the largest mafia game that we run... double the size of what is normally considered a 'large' game. For Capo, I don't think play balance is too much of an issue since the host (Seamus) is extremely experienced at hosting these things. However, the game is great fun simply due to the unique nature of its massive size. In Capo, the more participants, the more fun it is.