Mafia Detective: Hourly AI Mysteries

An hourly AI-powered mystery game inside Reddit where players interrogate a detective, unlock clues together, and race to solve the case.

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Inspiration

Reddit thrives on community-driven storytelling and social interaction. We wanted to bring the classic party game Mafia into Reddit in a way that feels native, scalable, and enhanced by AI. By combining Reddit threads with AI moderation and narration, we saw an opportunity to create a persistent, asynchronous social deduction experience that anyone can join.

What it does

Got it — you’re filling out a hackathon project submission (likely Devvit/Reddit-related). Below is a clean, ready-to-paste draft you can edit. I’ll assume your project is an AI-powered Mafia game on Reddit.

Inspiration

Reddit thrives on community-driven storytelling and social interaction. We wanted to bring the classic party game Mafia into Reddit in a way that feels native, scalable, and enhanced by AI. By combining Reddit threads with AI moderation and narration, we saw an opportunity to create a persistent, asynchronous social deduction experience that anyone can join.

What it does

Mafia Game is an AI-powered social deduction game that runs inside Reddit using Devvit.

Players join a game thread and are assigned hidden roles such as Mafia, Detective, or Villager. The game progresses through day and night cycles:

🌙 Night: Mafia chooses a target, Detective investigates. ☀️ Day: Players discuss in comments and vote to eliminate suspects. 🤖 AI Narrator: Summarizes discussions, advances the story, and enforces rules.

The AI helps: Summarize long comment threads Detect valid votes Keep the game moving

Create immersive narrative updates

How we built it

We built Mafia Game using: Devvit to integrate directly with Reddit posts and comments Reddit API for player interaction and voting

AI (LLMs) to: Summarize discussions Generate narrative updates Validate actions and votes

Node.js / TypeScript for game logic and state management

The game engine tracks: Player roles Game phases Win conditions

Challenges we ran into

  1. Parsing unstructured comments

  2. Ran out of gemini and openAI credits while testing and couldn't tell from the logs at first.

  3. Preventing chaos in large threads Reddit threads can become noisy. We used AI summaries to keep gameplay clear and focused.

  4. Fairness & moderation Ensuring the AI narrator stays neutral and enforces rules consistently required careful prompt design and safeguards.

  5. Async gameplay Unlike real-time Mafia, Reddit is asynchronous. We built timers and phase transitions that work across time zones.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

🎮 Fully playable game inside Reddit comments 🤖 AI narrator that enhances immersion instead of replacing players 📊 Automatic vote tracking and phase management 🌍 Asynchronous gameplay that works globally 🧩 Scalable design that supports many players

What we learned

AI works best as a facilitator, not a replacement for human interaction. Designing for Reddit requires embracing asynchronous, chaotic discussions. Clear system prompts are critical for consistent AI moderation. Social deduction games thrive when players feel agency and mystery.

What's next for Mafia Game

🧠 Smarter AI summaries and deception detection 🏆 Persistent stats and leaderboards 🔔 Notifications for phase changes 🧵 Multi-thread or cross-subreddit tournaments 🛡️ Anti-cheating and alt-account detection

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