Mafia in the ESL classroom?

[Torsten]

Hi, have you ever heard of a game called "Mafia" (also known under the variant Werewolf or Village)? It was developed by a Russian psychology student and you can play it with a group of 6 or more people. I was first introduced to it during my last stay in Kiev and I'm now thinking of implementing the game into my English language training sessions. Who of you has ever played that game or even used it in an ESL class?
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Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[Jamie (K)]

Never heard of it. Please elucidate.

[Torsten]

Hi think Wikipedia is going to do an excellent job:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(game)
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Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[medeya2012]

Hi all,

hmm very interesting,I wonder why I've never heard about this game hmm.Maybe I know the game, but not its name.
I'm so curious about this game, how do they play it?
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Either nothing is truth, or the truth is unknown to us...

[Torsten]

Well, in addition to the Wikipedia description of the game you might be interested in hear that playing Mafia can be highly entertaining and useful. You can practice your team playing skills, your ability to analyze a situation and draw conclusions, practice your body language and verbal skills and a lot more. We sometimes played it for hours and everyone got so involved and it was hard to stop.
_________________
Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[Pamela]

Hi Torsten,
I haven't heard of this game either. But it seems to be quite effective for ESL students. During my teaching practice I used another kind of game aiming at training our memory skills. The group usually consists of at least 20 members where a participant is to name any noun and the others one by one must repeat the nouns mentioned before in sequence and add their own word.In case anyone mixes up the order is the loser. The game proved to be very effective for those who are not at pains to train their memory and not drinking magnesium at all

[aereal]

Hi Torsten!

We've played this game several times with a dozen of students during the long nights in the bus, heading to the competitions, and the only thing i understood about this game is that it is complete nonsense!
I often identified the mafia members (with my eyes closed and head down) by the rude hand movements and noises they made during "night", and usually managed to convey these data to other members until killed the other night. Sometimes people believed me, sometimes not, but once one of the mobbers was accidentally killed, they all knew i was right.
If it happened that i was a bandit, i was one of the last members to be killed. Actually the game is pretty easy if you know how to play the good guy/bad guy roles. The result we obtained was that mafia never looses, unless players cheat.
maybe we played wrong game?

As for the classroom - the game should probably be very effective, but one has to ensure that all players participate! The entire game may fail if a single mafia "hitman" is silent, only because of his bad English!
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my game is fair play