Werewolf: A Family game of Betrayal, Deception and Murder

Early last year I came across the following article on wired.co.uk: Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon by Margaret Robertson.

Robertson introduced me to a game which, since then, I've played with my friends whenever we've got enough people together in a room. If you have the chance, give the article a read, but I'll describe the rules to you here and hope you can spread the word. The game is called Werewolf.

Now, I understand if you've stumbled across this you might have already heard of the game under a different name, perhaps Mafia (as one of my friends had heard) but I'm lead to believe there are a number of subtle differences and nuances which arise if you play the game correctly, so it might be worth following on regardless. Robertson describes the rules simply as:

Its core premise is simple -- a room is split between villagers and werewolves, and the former aren't aware who are their enemies, determined to eat them. Can the werewolves eat their prey before the villagers identify and lynch the werewolves?

Here's a bit more detail:

1) First off, you'll need a decent number of people. The minimum is probably 5, but more is preferable. Each player is assigned a category, in the simplest version either you are a villager or a werewolf. With a group of 5-7 you'd need 1 werewolf, 7-10 probably 2 and more than 11 you'll probably want 3 werewolves. No one other than the person themselves must know who is a villager and who is a werewolf (this is easily done with cue cards for each player - telling them their character). You will also need one narrator who knows everything.

2) The game is split into 2 stages; night and day. During the night, everyone closes their eyes and "sleeps", the narrator asks the werewolves to open their eyes and silently agree on one villager to horribly maul and leave bleeding and spluttering in their fields to die a slow and agonising death before the sun rises. When the deed is done, the narrator asks the werewolves to close their eyes and then announces the morning has arrived and everyone wakes up. The narrator informs the villagers who has been killed and they must sit the remainder of the game out.

3) The entire group must then agree on one person out of them to lynch. The trick is that the werewolves are also allowed to vote, but obviously no one knows who they are, so they must try to convince the villagers that one of their feeble peasants is the bloodthirsty killer. So, with their lynching target agreed upon, the accused is strung up and the narrator informs the group whether they killed a fellow villager or successfully targeted a werewolf. Night falls again and the werewolves are free to choose another to kill.

4) The game continues as such until either all the werewolves are dead (and the villagers win), or the werewolves outnumber the villagers (and the werewolves win).

Sounds simple enough, right? Right, it is! The rules in and of themselves are simple and straightforward, you can't go too far wrong. However, what happens when you begin to play is something else entirely. You might play one or two day/night cycles before it happens; but it will happen. You will go into "Werewolf Mode" - a state of consciousness where everything is relevant and nothing is irrelevant.

"Why are you so adamant that Josh is a werewolf? What are you hiding?"

"You've voted for Sarah three rounds in a row!"

"Why so quiet? Come on, perk up - afraid you'll say something you regret?!"

"Honest to God, I'm not! I don't know what to say, I'm not! AAARRRGGGHHH!"

The times I've played with friends I have learnt more about them than I had for the past 5 years. Robertson puts it aptly when she says:

It's your best bet of finding the most interesting people and of emerging the next morning with a couple of intriguing job offers. Rather than spend a fortune on funky business cards or hours memorising people's blog posts, the most effective way to connect in the tech industry may instead be to kill and eat them.

What I love about this game is it exercises your brain muscles. You can try to read every player's expressions throughout the game, see how they react to lynching their friends and allies, see whether they are particularly vocal about a particular suspect, or quiet when the blame is thrown at them. You can attempt to remember who each person votes for as a werewolf, try to remember who votes together and who never votes at all. Or you can keep schtum and hope no one notices the blood dripping from your fangs.
Whilst, on the surface the game is so simple; underneath there lies an undercurrent of real visceral investigative work - real brainboxing and mind-fu'ing. Above the simple villager/werewolf dynamic, there are further twists you can introduce once you get the hang of the basic rules. There are numerous characters you can assign to people, here's just a short list:

Vanessa Atalanta Trilogy - Puppetmaster Interview

Transcibed below is the 2 hour discussion myself, Dagada and Jess had with Paul and Deni - the PMs for Fifteen Days of Darkness. Most of what was said is down here, although I did cut out some of the stuff about Dagada running around his garden chasing rabbits in the nuddy.
Its pretty long, so I've sliced it down and headed each section so you can keep up. There's some pretty interesting stuff about being a PM and being a player in there, as well as some big story reveals for the whole trilogy. Its probably more relavent for those who played the game, but to those who didn't - I suggest giving it a go anyway, Paul and Deni talk about some really interesting aspects of ARGs and discuss where they think the genre is going in the future and its well worth a look.

I just want to thank Paul and Deni for taking the time to meet their players, its not a curtesy that every PM extends to those who game with them and I think we all appreciated the extra bit of effort.

So, here goes:

Introductions
{;PAUL}; ah - introductions - apologies - players Dagada and Distilled [mind if I use real names?] - Please meet my wonderful co-designer Deni, internet extraordinaire
{;Deni}; as I was going to say, working on this was some of my best work and was fun working with Paul :)
{;PAUL}; thanks
{;PAUL}; Deni worked really hard for me - am for me and about 8 or 9 pm start for you most nights yeh?
{;PAUL}; and this is why we worked well together - thinking along similar lines most times
{;PAUL}; Deni is based in Canada -which was VERY useful for when we did the first intro with Ben visiting the chat
{;Deni}; that was kinda fun for me being that certain someone in chat
{;PAUL}; shurrup now Deni, the grown ups are talking seriously... ;)
{;Deni}; pshhhh =P :)
{;PAUL}; yeah - Deni had never role-played or ARGed before - I told him what to type - and then we had Harold and I gave him free reign
{;Dagada}; Good work!
{;Distilled}; nice one, that’s not at all how I imagined you'd done it all
{;Deni}; In past experiences I had a habit of going to far at times so I usually try to avoid role-playing
{;PAUL}; but I was monitoring without being in the room courtesy of a great program called yuuguu which Deni put me onto..
{;PAUL}; so - sure you have many questions and such - in game stuff first?



Question 1 – Final Scenes
{;Distilled}; ok, first question - the final scenes
{;Distilled}; Did you expect us to approach the destroying of the plants in the way we did?
{;PAUL}; ok
{;PAUL}; tbh - the final scenes were partially ad hoc as plans that were arranged had to change and adapt quickly due to tech issues and access to net over Christmas
{;Deni}; fyi Paul was very good at adapting and dealing with issues that came up :)
{;PAUL}; so I moved the plants to London, used Ben as a 'vehicle' to get people to interact with them and then gave players full reign - I hoped that destruction was on the cards... but as you saw, Claire had an odd Christmas present didn't she?
{;Distilled}; indeed
{;Distilled}; Definitely dead though, she says...
{;PAUL}; life flower
{;Dagada}; Nothing is definite in this game. :D
{;Distilled}; 'spose
{;PAUL}; well one thing is definite - all has finished fully now.
{;Dagada}; Really? I was thinking it'd continue.
{;PAUL}; some of the characters might be used in other things but the full VA 'arc' has come full circle..




Question 2 – Changing Plans?
{;Dagada}; Paul, you seemed to lay a fair bit of groundwork at the start of the game - links on the postcards, etc, that didn't seem to fruit. Did plans change?
{;PAUL}; Dag - re postcards and beginning - I was extremely disappointed by initial interest and then absolute silence - someone realised UV viewing was 'essential' [it wasn't] and thus demanded that the game almost pays out for UV lights for everyone
{;PAUL}; it may do Dag - but both Deni and myself want to do something new - something fresh - and the back-story is a huge amount for new players to grapple with - it'd have to be a fresh start - despite the wonderful wikis created in last games
{;Dagada}; Yeah - there were some times when us players got a bit fixated on minor details and missed the massive trees in front of us.
{;Dagada}; some = many
{;PAUL}; I waited as a PM while players spent MONTHS putting the postcards together...
{;Deni}; I've seen it happen in many games
{;PAUL}; then Distilled came along and the game suddenly accelerated beyond compare
{;Distilled}; Wooo!
{;PAUL}; both Deni and I glanced at each other and it was solved [first part] within a few days
{;PAUL}; that was what I hoped would happen in the first month or so... but it didn't
{;Distilled}; Its a shame, I would have liked to have been there for the start - stuff was happening for me about that time and I don't think ARGs were on the forefront of my mind.
{;PAUL}; you can't predict players, and I may have overcomplicated things at the start - but I wanted to challenge and bring players together at same time - instead I got fractioning and people left. You learn from experience.

Continue after the jump for the rest of the interview - including info about Paul and Deni's plans for coming games, the future of Claire and Ben and a shock revalation about Meeka >>>

A Trained ARG Soldier

After New Year I have come to the realisation that playing too many alternate reality games has turned me into a Cluedo/post-it note game genius. I think it must be all the mind bendingly difficult puzzles, all the late nights staring at cryptic pictures trying to piece together strands of information to gather up a story, but over the past few days I have been a fully functional criminal mastermind.

I went up to my friend's parents hotel as planned, nice journey and its always good to spend time with old friends. Sarah, the friend who was hosting the party had decided (last minute) to add a "murder mystery" theme to the proceedings and so I was armed with my ornate dagger letter opener Swatts had brought back from Venice for me, and I was ready to put my puzzlebox to the test.
The first night was the 30th, the party proper wasn't starting till the night of the 31st (as is customary for New Years eve parties I believe), so we just drank a ridiculous amount of alcohol and played board games. As the night wore on we descended from a pretty intense game of Monopoly (which I still managed to lose, even after getting hotels on Park Lane and Mayfair!) down to the game where you have a post-it note on your forehead and you have to guess who you are. I managed to get my person in 3 guesses! Booyah! Are they male? Yes. Are they over the age of 30? Yes. Are they the Principal of our old college? Yes - you dick.

The next evening was the party itself, Sarah passed around bowls with 3 different categories written on strips of paper - one bowl for names, one for items and one for locations. Now, after we had picked out our three selections, we were informed that in order to "survive" to the end of the weekend, we would have to kill each other off. It was an interesting move for a party, murder, and it certainly put us all on edge! The idea was that we would have to brutally bludgeon our "mark" with our designated "murder weapon" in the location we were assigned, and so their assassination target would pass to us. The person with the most murders to their name by the end of the weekend would be the winner. We were told this at dinner, and I can tell you - noone would accept ANYTHING from anyone else for the rest of the evening: "Hey Sam, pass me the salt", "Oh, I bet you'd love that wouldn't you - here I am passing the salt and then BAM, I'm lying salted in the gutter, dehydrated to death - I'm watching you..."

My mark was my friend Becky, and my weapon was to be a mobile phone - easy freaking peasy. Unfortunately, I picked a freaking doozy of a location. Off the hotel grounds. By the time I found this out it was already well past dark, and I'm not sure how my friend would feel about me luring his girlfriend down into the night in order to murder her with a mobile phone. I had to bide my time, but also, I had to keep an eye open because someone would have picked out my name, and would be baying for my blood! And to make matters worse, Becky was being super-paranoid about it, she wouldn't even accept a sparkler from me - asking that I put it down on the step so she could pick it up!

As the evening wore on, friends were picked off, girlfriend was taken out by a shoe wielded by my friend Ed. She didn't mind, it meant he had to deal with her mark, which was to somehow take out a guy she'd never met with a book. Ed didn't get very far with that either, no sooner had he killed the girl, then he was assassinated by Rob and his oh-so-mightier-than-a-sword pen, in the girls toilet - no less. We decided not to enquire as to why Ed and Rob were hanging out in the girl's loos. Ditt fell foul to a box of biscuits, Shirley to a teacup and Josh was powerless against Sam's pringles tube. But I persevered. In fact, I made it till the morning - the fresh morning air had never smelled so sweet! I didn't even mind that it was infused with the smell of 4 twenty-something guys all sleeping in sleeping bags and exuding noxious gasses - I was alive! Now to enact my dastardly plan: