The Syndicate

The fact that there is fairly general agreement that mafia was not a mafia game is support for my theorem

Mafia? ceased to be a mafia game

I think the amount of rules that would have to be broken before a game ceased to be mafia is very small.

Short answer: yes, very much so.

To me, the vast majority and perhaps total sum of everything we would call mafia games fits within a very limited scope. There are very few formal variations between games and those variations are often only allowed under certain conditions, or with caveats. I can think of no game that has run in my time which has not fit well within the standard boundaries of mafia (Inception, grasslands probably the closest for the multiple threads thing) and thus I think the idea that mafia could ever be both in equal parts just doesn’t correspond to how we view mafia.

I don't think in practicality the one that everyone is voting for is accurate to how we play games