Werewolf Post-Mortem

Right. Werewolf is a good game. Now, I did win, so that probably added to the experience, but you don't care about that at all. What you want to hear about is the game itself. So:

The game itself is designed from simplicity; theres a bunch of Werewolves about and you don't know who; they kill one of you every night and you can kill one person each day. Try and kill werewolves, try not to die. Easy to understand, easy to get into. The games that have lasted longest over the centuries tend to be the simpler ones because the game itself has no requirements. You don't need a playing board, a table, a pen and pad, or even much of an understanding of the rules. This makes Werewolf good; even the people who know the least about it can join in after less than a minutes explaining.

As for the actual game; there are the good and the bad. For starters, when it comes to actual killing of Werewolves, everyone's basically guessing blind. There is no way to figure out who they are if the Werewolves are playing smart enough. It leaves the non-werewolves (lets call them town members for now) to blind guess their way to a victory based off of the smallest circumstantial evidence or hoping the werewolves have rubbish poker faces. This can lead to some frustrating moments for the town members and generally means that the only interesting decision making in the game is left with the werewolf minority. A great experience for a few people; but at the cost of possible boredom of frustration from the majority.

Thats not to say the town has a disadvantage. The main strong point about the game is how its balanced; as more town members are horribly mauled to death by werewolves, it becomes easier for the town to guess who the werewolves are. If nothing else; their statistically more likely to random guess a werewolf to death. The town itself also has the ability to design methods in order to catch the werewolves out; to give a good example, the voting system that was used in the class's game. Because there were no defining or binding rules to the voting system; it could allow people to change opinions dynamically. With a bit of thought; the town could wait until someone was randomly voted for death, see who voted for their death, and treat them as suspects instead. They could use the shared knowledge the werewolves have (in that they know who each other are) as a way to figure them out. After all; the werewolves aren't going to vote each other up for death.

Overall; there would be ways to improve the games skill and tactics, but that would just take away the biggest advantage of werewolf; its accessibility. Complicated versions such as Town Of Salem exist, but the added complexity adds a much higher skill cap to it that puts newer players at a disadvantage. Werewolf does what it sets out to do amicably and at the very least deserves a look at just for that.

                                                                                                                          8/10 IGN