Mafia!

I finally found this game.  Or just close enough to the game that makes it such a relief.  

Now is the long part, of how I found the game, and how finding this game was so difficult.

Where to begin.  It was about two years ago that my family was in Utah.  It was a Friday night and we were playing games.  You can read all about it here.

It was a pretty fun few games we played one was signs, the other Mafia.  Each person had some sort of role I guess and day and night, people got "killed" or eliminated and the game went on.  It was a fun game.  My mom apparently really enjoyed it.

It wasn't until maybe the end of the year or maybe the middle of it that my mom was thinking about that game.  Thought it would be a good game to play with the family.  It was something that everyone enjoyed and was pretty interesting.  We had entertained family with Rock band the year before during Christmas time but due to the fact that it moved to Texas with the rest of Tanya's stuff that wasn't going to happen.  

My mom was now in search of this game, although at the time she wasn't quite sure what it was called.  It was something like detective to her, but she was looking all over.  

She went to Talbots looking, they suggested Barnes and Nobel, where she found a few other things to entertain people for Christmas, but not the game she was looking for.

I then went back to my notes, went back to what I was sure would have the right name of the game, because I was sure detective wasn't the right name of that game.   Search. Notes. Scan and then there in the middle of the page the name of the game, MAFIA.  Vua La! 

Stores didn't help.  Next was my turn, knowing the name and having a little more experience using and searching the internet. I found out that I wasn't completely crazy.  I couldn't really find it anywhere.  Amazon wasn't helpful, I found video games that were named maifa, or online games or something that seemed like a mafia game, but by description came nothing close to this game we were looking for. Then a plain google search for mafia, then redefined my search for mafia cards, since our roles were printed on cards.  

That helped some.  Mafia card game did exist!  It was on wikipedia, which isn't the completely best source, but like I said, I realized I wasn't crazy!  

Then I found this:  Mafiacards.com which I thought was going to relief me since it explained carefully and then when I tried to order some, thinking I could try and order it and give it to my mom as a surprise.  That didn't work!  I got an email that confirmed that the payment was processed.  Then an hour or so later I got an email that said "sorry we are out of stock... blah, blah, blah...a full refund will be given to you."  

I WAS SO CLOSE!
The website also mentioned store locations, the bad part was they were all in Oregon or Washington.  Two places I wasn't going anytime soon.  

I was waiting.  They said they were waiting for new stock. Hmm maybe a couple months, maybe? NO!  Tried again and got the same results.  This wasn't really fun anymore.

And I know what you're thinking!  Hey smarty pants, why don't you ask the people who you played the game with, who owned the game where they got it and ask them all this stuff.  Um, I don't know why it didn't happen.  Maybe we were hoping that eventually we would find it, or maybe it was just something you couldn't buy anymore which would have been depressing. 

Now we come to this past week.  Hoping for changed results I once again try and buy the game once more from this online vendor and once again get the same crap result.  

Then it was Wednesday.  My boyfriend and I decide to go and do something a little different with our evenings besides watching Star Trek on Netflix.  We thought about bowling before going to dinner.  Apparently some kind of league was coming in, and all lanes were on reserve for them, which meant no bowling.    We were going to just drive away and not go anywhere, but we did want to somewhat entertain ourselves.  There was a game shop near by, called Gator Games, that I had never even known was there.  How long its been there, I don't know.  But until that day I had never even noticed it, or if I did there was really no interest in it. We walked in and looked around.  Mafia had come back to mind for me.  This was a game shop that held all sorts of games: board games, card games, strange games I never even heard of and games I didn't really understand.  This was the perfect.  We looked in all the other spots, and because this was a place with some pretty interesting games I thought I'd take a chance.  

Search, search, search, and then on the point of giving up, there it was the word Mafia.  And it was a board/card game not a computer type game.  It seemed right.  Read the back and based on that information it was the best thing/closet thing to what we were looking for.  I was so relieved.

Almost two years and we've found it!  Hooray!  Hooray!  Hooray!!