Blood on the Moon over Zoom

March 20, 2021 7:52 AM

How To Play Werewolf Over Zoom.
posted by storybored (6 comments total)

Well, that is highly detailed. Also, as some who was gaming group adjacent to when Werewolf was developed as a variant of Mafia, the first sentence amuses me.
posted by meinvt at 9:20 AM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

I had almost forgotten about this (type of) game until a few weeks ago when I played Among Us.
posted by oceano at 3:34 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ive never understood how the healer/protector is supposed to work, because they seem to be immortal as long as they look out for themselves.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:59 PM on March 20, 2021

yeah but that doesn't help the village much - ideally they should protect themselves until they are convinced they know who the seer(s) is then protect the seers until they are killed
posted by mbo at 8:32 PM on March 20, 2021

Going to drop in a suggestion to try Blood on the Clocktower, if you like social deduction games but wish they were more social and more deductive. It has a similar ruleset to Werewolf/Mafia, but a few important tweaks make the game far more satisfying - in particular, giving good a lot more information but making it unreliable, giving evil more reliable lies, having lots of roles that get information only on the first day, letting players who die continue to talk but can only vote a single time, and having a human moderator who can keep the game fresh and confuse the inevitable metagame that forms when players realise that one of their friends is either too good at lying or the buttmonkey.

A physical version is coming out later this year, just in time for in-person gatherings to become practical again, but there are online implementations of the game. I can't vouch for any of them, but this one has both the basic script which is most similar to Werewolf/Mafia, and the more complex scripts which introduce variant demons and the 'madness' mechanic, where players must avoid saying something important, or be killed. The draft rules are here, and the draft character rules for the simplest version, Trouble Brewing, are here.
posted by Merus at 9:07 PM on March 20, 2021 [7 favorites]

Some of the best games are when god messes with the rules - for example when god chooses no werewolves and just kills people at random, I wonder how amenable zoom is to this sort of stuff, or maybe there's whole new sorts of fuckery possible
posted by mbo at 3:33 AM on March 21, 2021