You can download the rules online or buy the proper box. In short:

People split into two teams . There’s a president and a bomber.

Each team goes into a different room. If the president and the bomber are in the same room after 3 rounds then the bombers team wins or vice versa.

A round is 3 minutes and each round gets a minute shorter. You vote for a team leader in each room and they choose a person to switch when the round ends.

You can show anyone your team, or your role or both.

That’s a little dumbed down, but if you like mafia well worth a look!

Anyway, I greatly enjoyed your analyzation, I’m curious as to how you’d tackle the more typical version of the game, and I’m sorry my first comment on your blog is so terribly self-indulgent. Looking forward to archives binging – you write some pretty interesting stuff.

Personally, I loved Werewolf as a curiosity the few times I’ve played it. It’s a fun party activity. I don’t think very well of it as a game though–and not even because I dislike player elimination (which I do). One Night Werewolf is supposed to be a solution to some of it’s problems but I find One Night Werewolf is even worse than werewolf proper, concentrating it’s worst issues into a game that consists of *nothing but* those issues. It is a game of pure luck and charisma; there is very little tactic to it, you have very little agency (you can’t show people your card, you’re part of a voting system so you can’t directly effect those decisions, etc), unless you have a special power an even then you have almost no data to go on in the game proper and even LESS in one-night werewolf were there are no patterns to observe over the course of a longer game–just pure lies and shouting and such.

In Two Rooms and a Boom, you have agency–your fate is somewhat in the hands of leaders, and charisma and luck matter … but you can show people your card. You have something you can do all on your own that doesn’t require anyone’s permission or a vote. This seems like a small detail that can as easily screw you as help you, but that little bit of agency builds confidence in the mechanical systems and makes players feel more involved with the trust-based mechanics. The resistance carries over many of Werewolf’s problems but diffuses them slightly; again players have little agency–only the villains can even choose whether to pass or fail a mission (not that you’d want to fail a mission as a good player, but that’s just it–the mechanics don’t give you any viable choices to make there, whether or not you’re technically allowed to do it (which you aren’t)), but there’s no voting. You are responsible for who you do or do not trust; your fate is only decided by vote when it comes to approving of a leader’s team (much as Two Rooms and a Boom allows you to vote for a leader, who then makes the final decision personally). The leader has agency, but that agency can be taken away if they lose too much trust; but it’s yet more clever because you don’t vote for the leader, you vote to approve the leader’s decision (unlike in Two Rooms)–you vote based on less nebulous data than in Werewolf, and though it is kind of a toss-up between Resistance and Two Rooms as to which vote uses more nebulous data.

I like comparing these games because they all have the same sort of goal, and basically all of them do better than Werewolf in at least a few ways–containing the game, creating more usable data, giving players more agency, giving players mechanical systems on top of the social ones (See: BSG, SoC–the latter being particularly clever for reasons I won’t go into since this is already a bit longer than I meant it to be). At the end of it, these games rely primarily on social mechanics which will play out differently in different groups of people, but precisely the same, really, from game to game with only somewhat meaningful differences when you swap around this or that role for this or that other one. Of all these games, though, werewolf (especially One Night) has the most mechanically difficult goal and thus is, to me, the weakest since the social systems are so variable as to be rather difficult to compare precisely. In Two Rooms, the end will always come down to a 50/50 shot even if you have NO data. In The Resistance, you can logically eliminate a good number of possibilities in all but the most specialty-role-filled, expertly executed games leaving BOTH teams a fairly feasible goal though it usually leans a little toward the spies in the classic game, I think, since the good guys have to have utter confidence in the final team. In Werewolf, the data in the game is pretty much entirely social unless you play with something as clumsy as the “Guess who the werewolves are!” card (The Seer? Guardian Angel? Whatever its called). Even when you know exactly how many characters of what sort are left … you have *no* meaningful mechanical distinctions to draw between those players unless you’re playing with a card that simply tells you the answer and even then you run out of meaningful data the moment multiple people claim to have that role and offer contradictory information. One Night, again, makes this even worse. Sure, you might know whose whatsit was swapped with whoms, but you have no idea what the whatsits were before you swapped them unless one of theirs is yours … which would only really be useful and interesting if the player you swapped with could look at their tile so you could see what THEY did with THEIR data and fill in the gaps.

For a better example of the kind of confusion One Night tries to monopolize on, I highly recommend Mascarade in which you frequently have no idea who you are but can check if you waste a whole turn to do so or bluff and pretend you know who you are and hope no one calls you on it. Or Coup in which you know which two abilities you have access to, how many of each card is in the deck (thus the likelihood of anyone having a particular combination of two abilities), and can always bluff to access the other four abilities … except that getting caught bluffing loses you a) one of your card/ability slots for the rest of the game and b) accordingly one of your two “lives”–the result is a bluffing game in which you have very little room to screw up especially since everyone is stockpiling money in order to remove your cards from you, too–bluff a defense against the assassin and you can find yourself out of the game, losing one card to the called bluff and one card to the assasin itself. Bluff that you HAVE the assasin and you can find yourself losing one of your cards instead. Both of these games are clever, short, easy to teach, one involves elimination and one doesn’t, and they manage to do hidden-information (which always involves bluffing and “no, do it to THAT guy, he’s winning!” type deflections and thus social elements) with much meatier mechanics that make for stronger, more consistent play and make victory through social means feel that much more exciting and cool and victory without charisma entirely feasible.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tedalspach/1-night-onlyone-night-ultimate-werewolf-in-time-fo

In the One Night, starting roles can be swapped during the night phase, when everyone else’s eyes are closed. For example, you may have been a Werewolf when the night started, but then the Thief came and replaced your identity with something else…but you don’t get to re-check, or even know for sure if your card got swapped.

This adds an interesting layer to the “truth or lie” mechanic. For one thing, players who got to switch or peek at cards have meta information about whose roles have been changed.

Players declare their role publicly by taking a token. Since these tokens are limited by type, you may think you’re a Villager but you might have to take a Werewolf token because (you would claim), “Someone stole my token before I could grab it!”

There’s only one round (and it’s timed). Players only get one chance to pick someone to kill, and there are various victory conditions depending on who dies. There’s even a Suicide role who WANTS to be killed by mistake. If he convinces you he’s a Werewolf and the town murders him, he wins.

I only played two rounds of this so I don’t know much about the best strategies. I did manage to throw everyone off by selecting Werewolf immediately — usually people only take that token if all the others get grabbed first. People assumed I either WAS a Werewolf trying for a double-bluff, or I was the Suicide.

Actually, I was the Troublemaker… I figured running around town boasting I was a Werewolf was the kind of thing a Troublemaker would do.

Also, nothing stops wolves from lynching one of their own to build trust.

The problem with claiming day 1 is that now the scum/”wolves” know exactly who the doctor and the cop are. They don’t have to claim a power role and it would be _incredibly stupid_ to do anything other than claim vanilla/”villager.” Then it’s a simple matter of killing the defender the first night and then killing the cop the next + then playing the best you can afterwards.

It’s been a small trend for years on various forums I go to to play it as a play-by-post game, which allows the scum to converse amongst themselves in private, adding more strategy complexity and allowing for more power roles to get added to make up for it [of course, anyone not-scum must communicate in-thread publically, and the dead tell no tales at all]. Without the ability to communicate with your team by playing in public, though, I still think keeping it as simple as possible is best.