Pick the group size on purpose

Five is the minimum and gives one Mafia versus a Detective and three Citizens: tight and fast, good for teaching. Seven to nine is the classic party size with two Mafia and both a Detective and a Doctor. Eleven and up adds the Bodyguard and a Godfather who fools the Detective, which is where the game gets deep. Twenty-five is the ceiling, with two Detectives, a Vigilante and a Jester in play.

Choose the day timer for your table

The day timer is the biggest lever a host has. Sixty seconds keeps regulars sharp and makes a 9-player game finish in about ten minutes. Ninety to one hundred twenty seconds suits mixed tables. Longer timers give new players time to find their voice but let strong talkers dominate, so shorten it once the group knows the roles.

Open or private?

A private room is join-by-code only; nobody can browse into it and games there are unranked. An open room appears in Find a game and Quick Match, fills empty seats with strangers, and counts toward the ranked ladder once five real players are seated at the start. Many hosts start open to fill the table, then keep the same group for rematches.

Narrator voice and language

Every room has a narrator who calls the phases, names the night's victim at dawn and announces saves. You choose English or Arabic when creating the room, and in Arabic you can also pick a specific narrator voice. The narrator also reads players' names, so unusual names are pronounced consistently for everyone.

Bots, kicks and rematches

Four table bots sit in every new lobby and leave one by one as humans arrive, so you can start a game the moment you feel like it. The host can kick a disruptive player from the lobby. After the game ends, one tap starts a rematch with the same table, and spectators who arrived mid-game are seated automatically. If the host disconnects mid-game, hosting passes to another player instead of ending the game.

House etiquette that keeps people coming back

• Ask everyone to stay in the dead lounge: post-mortem chat is half the fun.
• Ban role-revealing screenshots; the game only works if information stays private.
• Let quiet players speak first in the day phase at least once per game.
• Use the report and block tools for anything hostile rather than arguing at the table.