Free lesson · Level 1 of 10 · Beginner
When there are more than four cards
Our own table plays the tournament shape: six ordinary town players, a sheriff, two against the town, and the one who leads them. Plenty of clubs add cards beyond those, and that is the most common difference between one club and another.
Those additions almost always do one of two things. Some of them protect, so a player picks somebody each night to survive a shot. Others act alone, kill on their own account, and win by outlasting both sides.
What those cards change is not the reading of people but the arithmetic underneath it. Say seat nine holds a doctor's card, and the night passes with nobody dead. Yesterday, at a four-card table, a quiet night meant the three failed to agree; tonight it means nothing of the kind, because seat nine may simply have saved whoever was shot.
Beginners keep the old arithmetic and build a version of the game on top of it, which is how a quiet night turns into a confident accusation of nobody in particular.
So ask early which extra cards are in play. Then re-check what a quiet night can mean at this table before you read anything at all into it.
In the school: one idea per lesson, its questions, and a table or a puzzle to try it on.
Open this lesson in the school — free
Source: The rules of Mafia (Russian, 1 February 2026), §1.1 — the four-card tournament deck that club roles are added to · our rules page