The game that I decided to play is One-Night Werewolf. The game is developed by Bezier Games and Inc and Ted Alspach. The game didn’t appear to have any targeted users as it appeared that it was designed for anyone to play based on its simplicity. However, from briefly playing the game in class, I believe that it would be best to play One-Night Werewolf with individuals that you are comfortable with, maybe with friends and/or family. I only say this because I noticed how people did not truly play to achieve the objective of the game, which is using deception to outwit the other contestants.
In terms of the number of individuals that can play the game, I will say that you need a minimum of 3 players. While there is not necessarily any cap on the number of players that can play, I believe that a maximum of about 20 players will be alright. I only say this because, based on my experience of playing the game in class, the game became chaotic as there were more people. In terms of the procedures of One-Night Werewolf, the moderator assign each player a role. The way that the game was played is that there was a moderator, werewolves, and villagers. The werewolves were tasked with killing a villager to win, whereas the villager was tasked with killing off a werewolf. The game had a “day and night”. According to the rules, during the night cycle, no players were allowed to talk and the werewolves had to decide on an individual that they would like to kill. In the daytime, the players must come to some form of consensus on voting out the person they suspect to be a werewolf. Thus, the objective of the game was to outwit your opponent, where a werewolf would compete against a villager, making it a unilateral competition.
I would say that the following game resembled that of Mafia. The only distinction between the two games is the storyline, where the role of the werewolf is replaced by the mafia. I would say that Mafia has slightly fewer roles compared to One-Night Werewolf, which makes it simpler and easier to understand for beginners.
The type of fun experienced in this game is definitely fellowship as people had to interact and convince each other to trust them. I really enjoyed playing the game with my friends and it was quite fun to deceive my friends when I was the werewolf. An epic fail in the game is when we first started playing. My friends who had played the game before were able to deceive me easily, and I struggled a bit with role-playing. However, after playing multiple rounds, I started to develop my own strategies to win.
One thing I would change to make the game better would be providing more resources to assist the moderator with fulfilling their task. I noticed how some of my friends who were the moderator for a game found it quite difficult to create a storyline of how a player in the game died. Thus, I believe it would be helpful to provide some context (eg. setting, way in which the person died) to help the narrator in building their story.
