Who is Ninja?

It is feudal Japan, and the Emperor is hosting a gathering of Samurai at his castle, but his spies report that it has been infiltrated by Ninja disguised as Samurai who intend to assassinate the Emperor; the Emperor, in his wisdom, has disguised one of his Geisha as a Samurai (during the day; returning to being a Geisha at night) with the objective to covertly discover the identity of the Ninja. Each day the Emperor will execute a Samurai based on the most votes of those present.

The game will be led by a moderator (a volunteer or randomly chosen), who does not participate in the voting, and is played by the participating players who are either Ninja, Samurai, or Geisha. It is the objective of the Ninja to secretly assassinate the Samurai and Geisha until there is an equal number of Ninja and Samurai (and/or Geisha), in which case the Ninja overpower the Samurai and assassinate the Emperor (a fictional person) and win the game. The Geisha tries to determine which of the players are Ninja to help determine who should be executed. It’s the objective of the Samurai and Geisha to correctly identify and execute the Ninja; they win once all the Ninja have been eliminated.

Who is Ninja? is a party game for 7 to 18 players that involves discussion/argument and pits players against each other to vote for who they think is Ninja and put them out of the game.

NOTE: This game is based on the card game Mafia.

NOTE: In Japanese, there is no distinction between singular and plural nouns, therefore we’ve decided to use the singular forms of Ninja and Samurai as plural.