Games Like Mafia Wars

If you played Mafia Wars, you remember the shape of it: jobs that spent your energy, a level bar that always looked one more job away from filling, properties that paid out while you were gone, a fight list of other players, and a mafia built out of your friends list. Zynga ran it on Facebook through the social-game boom, and closed it in 2016.

The game is gone. The loop is not. It came from an older family of text-driven crime games, and that family is still very much alive in the browser, with no Facebook account needed.

Where the loop lives on

An honest list first. These are the games people point to when somebody asks what replaced Mafia Wars, and most of them have been running far longer than this one.

Games change, so treat the table as a starting point and go and look. And if what you miss most is the social side, a game full of your old friends, no list can give that back. That was Facebook in 2009, not any one game.

What changed since Mafia Wars

Two things about Mafia Wars aged badly. The first is that your mafia was your friends list: the fastest way to get stronger was to invite people, and the game's walls were built to make you. The second is that most of your opponents were barely there. You fought names on a list, and nothing you did to them, or they to you, lasted.

The browser crime games that came before and after it never worked that way. Your crew is the players you choose to run with, and every opponent is a real person who remembers what you did.

How Crime City plays it

The loop will feel familiar within minutes. You start with $1,000 and a list of jobs, from a corner store up to a bank vault, each with its own odds, cost and payout. You train your stats, buy buildings that keep producing while you are offline, race cars, join a gang, and fight other players.

Three things are different, and they are the point of it. Every opponent is a real player. A season lasts 25 days, after which the city wipes and everyone, last season's winners included, starts again on level 1. And death is real: a successful kill operation ends a character for the rest of the season.

Coming from Mafia Wars: what maps to what

Every right-hand entry links to its full page in the Street Guide.

Who should not bother

If what you want is a character you keep building for years, a seasonal game is the wrong shape and Torn will suit you better. If you want something to tap through for two minutes while nobody can touch you, the stakes here will annoy you: other players can and will come for you. And if you want huge crowds at every hour, older games are bigger. Crime City is new.