Voting games can be painful. I remember Mafia, which is very crowd-dependent. People who slow-play/minimax games make Mafia intolerable. At 3:00 in the morning with 3 players left, the 30-minute discussions are painful. Just kill someone and lose or win already.
The variant I built (to give something useful to start the discussion, rather than blind suspicion) had a combat mechanic. You actually had to "buy" arms in order to do your killings. This meant that Mafia actually left a trace, because it was public information who purchased. (There was no in-game currency. The cost of buying arms was visibility.) If you were Mafia, you'd probably want to buy arms. On the other hand, the good guys also could benefit by arming up. The result of this was that there are two different strategies. You can not buy arms often (or ever) and evade suspicion during the day, but be weak against brawls and Mafia... or you can buy them at every opportunity and be strong in combat, but arouse suspicion and be more likely to die in the day phase.
There was also a brawling phase. If you thought someone was Mafia and wanted to go vigilante, you could. However, they could defend themselves. in addition to dying, you could end up wounded, which would make it obvious the next morning that you were in some kind of fight.
- Actual data to base your votes on (Mafia can be fun, but the games of it I play never have 30 minute discussions because there's just nothing to discuss -- we just pick someone semi-randomly to lynch.)
The commercial release is very nice, but it can be played with regular cards too.
I used to play board games with people like that, and the problem is easily fixed with a kitchen timer :)
Timer goes off? Turn over, too bad. Given the average number of turns in a game and how long you want to play for, you can work out what to set it at (maybe with a 25-50% leeway)
An interesting variant is to put the timer in a box so that you don't know how long you have left.
The variant I built (to give something useful to start the discussion, rather than blind suspicion) had a combat mechanic. You actually had to "buy" arms in order to do your killings. This meant that Mafia actually left a trace, because it was public information who purchased. (There was no in-game currency. The cost of buying arms was visibility.) If you were Mafia, you'd probably want to buy arms. On the other hand, the good guys also could benefit by arming up. The result of this was that there are two different strategies. You can not buy arms often (or ever) and evade suspicion during the day, but be weak against brawls and Mafia... or you can buy them at every opportunity and be strong in combat, but arouse suspicion and be more likely to die in the day phase.
There was also a brawling phase. If you thought someone was Mafia and wanted to go vigilante, you could. However, they could defend themselves. in addition to dying, you could end up wounded, which would make it obvious the next morning that you were in some kind of fight.