One-Night Ultimate Werewolf heightens the chaos of the parent game Mafia by imposing a time limit and its mechanics of role assignment and actions. One-Night Werewolf (ONW) is a social deduction game developed by Bezier Games. It can be played by 3-10 players, and is a Mafia spinoff game. The game is available online, but I played it in-person with a group of 5 others. This version uses cards to assign roles, and the game’s moderator is actually a free app, which tells players when to wake and counts down the time as players discuss.
In comparison to the parent game Mafia, there are far more roles, and more limited time. The goal of the game is for the townspeople to vote out the werewolf or werewolves. One of the mechanics of ONW is that most players will wake up and perform some action in the middle of the night, such as looking at their role, switching their role with a different one, or looking at someone else’s role. Because people’s roles can be switched, there is an element of randomness to the game, and voting is highly uncertain. Additionally, the chaos of the game is heightened because there is only one “night” of discussion for a few minutes, after which players must vote, no matter the state of discussion. There are three center cards, which are roles that are unassigned to players, so the player roles will vary from game to game, as could the number of werewolves.
When playing Mafia in class, I noticed that the villagers, or people who weren’t assigned special roles, were far more likely to be uninterested in the outcome and less invested in the game. When I was a villager myself, I played the game more as a bystander. There was very limited information provided to me, and no reason to lie or to accuse without evidence. But when I had a special role, I would pay much closer attention to the game, since I would be granted some kind of unique action or information that gave me more power in the game.
On the other hand, ONW encourages all players to be equally invested in the game. In comparison to Mafia, ONW balances the disparity of information by having several unique roles, so nearly every player has information that others do not know. Additionally, even the standard Villager player has reason to lie. Since there are only a small number of each role, and only a few villagers, villagers may lie about their role to try to bait out werewolves, since werewolves may claim to be villagers.
The potential for roles to change also adjusted the dynamics of the game. In one game, I was the Seer, a role that allows you to look at a different person’s card. I looked at someone’s card and figured out their role, but then during the discussion stage, they claimed they were the Seer. It turned out that we were both right, since a different player swapped our cards (the Troublemaker role), but this made me deeply suspicious of the other player who claimed to be the Seer, even though neither of us were werewolves. This ended up benefitting the werewolves, since we spent a large chunk of time discussing this.
Evidently, ONW expands upon one of Mafia’s greatest weaknesses: the asymmetrical level of investment and interest in the game between special roles and villagers. It creates novel social dynamics through imposing a stringent time limit, encouraging deceit from all players, and allowing for players to perform unique actions not seen in other Mafia spin-offs.
