Player’s Guide

Werewolf is a game with two teams. The larger team, Villagers, vs. the smaller team, Werewolves. It’s played in rounds of days and nights and facilitated by a moderator. The Villagers don’t know who the werewolves are, but the werewolves know who each other are. Werewolves never reveal that they are werewolves, they profess with their last dying breath that they are villagers.

Nights: Werewolves Awake
Each night, everyone closes their eyes and the Werewolves are woken and select a Villager to eliminate from the game. (This is prompted by me with the cue “Werewolves, open your eyes. Indicate another player to eat tonight.” They point, while keeping quiet.) The goal for the Werewolves is to eat all the villagers.

Days: Social Period & Nominations
Each day, all the villagers (including the werewolves who are pretending to be villagers) nominate and vote a player for banishment (elimination from the game). They do this based on their suspicions of which players are Werewolves. The goal of the villager team is to banish all of the werewolf team members before the werewolves eat all the villagers. If a Villager nominates another villager for banishment, and that banishment is successful, the nominator will draw suspicion from the other players that perhaps the nominator is actually a werewolf.

The vote and the night periods have the players seated in a circle. During the day there are “social periods” where the players get up and mingle. During this time, the villagers may ask each other “Are you a werewolf” and other such questions and gauge if the other player is lying. Sometimes sounds at night make a villager suspicious that his/her neighbour may be a werewolf.

No Secret Ballots
Aside from sounds at night, and shifty answers during the day, careful villagers may notice that certain players didn’t vote for the banishment of someone believed to be a werewolf. Why wouldn’t that person vote for banishment? Maybe that person is also a werewolf and is protecting his/her team-mate. Then again, maybe that person doesn’t believe the nominee is a werewolf and is voting against banishment to protect a fellow villager.

The All Knowing See-er
The game is made increasingly interesting through additional special roles, the most powerful of which for the Villager team is the “Seer”. Literally, someone who sees players for what they truly are: werewolves or villagers. Each night, the Seer player is awoken after the werewolves have gone back to sleep, and the Seer points to one other player in the game circle. The moderator reveals if that player is a Werewolf or a villager. Through this process, the Seer builds up knowledge of who’s who, and the job of the Seer is to dissipate this information to his or her fellow villagers, so villagers don’t accidentally banish their own kind and can, instead, banish the Werewolves.

 

Werewolves are Deceptive
Not everything is as it seems. For example: You may be a Villager and another player identifies herself to you as the Seer, and informs you that another player is definitely a Werewolf. Then you nominate that other player for banishment. Only problem is that when the banishment occurs, the player you nominated is revealed to be a Villager, and now the other players suspect you of being a Werewolf and put you up for banishment. Turns out that the player who identified himself as the Seer was lying, part of the game, and is actually a Werewolf posing as the Seer in order to trick the villagers into reducing their own numbers.

So You’re Dead
When players are eliminated from the game, they are moved to “The Afterlife”. The game is great fun to watch when you can see the night cycle and when you know who everyone is. While in the afterlife, players can talk amongst themselves during the day, but it’s strictly forbidden for members of the Afterlife to communicate directly with the living players. (Chatting, winking, pointing etc). That’s cheating. During the night and the vote, the Afterlife is silenced. Depending on the way the moderator has configured the game, there may be some opportunities for the afterlife to be involved by way of the moderator.