Overview
One Night Ultimate Werewolf is a Mafia-like social deduction game made by Bezier Games. I played the local version of the game, where players are seated physically next to each other around a table.
Key Differences
Immediately, a significant distinction between this game and Mafia is that, while both games have a narrator moderator, One Night’s game master is fully automated through a voice played aloud from the game’s associated digital app. This alters the aesthetic of the game, with player enjoyment focused more on the player-to-player dynamics created via the unique mechanics available to each player. As such, Mafia focuses more on roleplay through a human game master and One Night shifts things to focus more on its gameplay mechanics and whatever aesthetics emerge from that. One Night is also, on average, a much shorter game since there exists only one night phase and one deliberation phase, as opposed to Mafia. That change, along with the many new villager roles introduced by One Night, makes for a more equitable experience for all players since most players will have an action to perform during the night phase and everyone will provide input during the deliberation phase. I think Mafia’s design of needing to kill players (largely at random) to progress the game and get more clues makes for a poor experience for those who get unlucky.
Mechanics
The structure of the game (and its mechanics) follow similarly to Mafia. There exists two phases, a night or action phase and a day or deliberation phase. To begin the game, every player is given a card that lists their role. The main dynamics of the game emerge from the specific mechanics available to different roles. There exist a minimum of two factions, the werewolves and the villagers, and the social deduction of the game revolves around the villagers trying to figure out who the werewolves are during the deliberation phase and for the werewolves to escape capture during the deliberation phase. The setup thus far is almost identical to Mafia, but here is where things differ. One Night opts to give the villager faction way more diversity as opposed to Mafia. There are roles like the Masons, who get the ability to see who each other are during the night phase. There is the Seer, who gets to inspect one other player’s card (or two cards from the center – I’ll get to that), as well as the Minion, who wakes up in the night to verify who the werewolves are, but the Minion only wins if the werewolves do and as such is on the werewolves team.
Similarly to Mafia, the beauty of these overlying mechanics stem from one of the core dynamics of the game: you can never be sure of information outside of what you yourself can confirm. The social deduction stems from trust and logic – during the deliberation phase, players can communicate who they are and what they have learned as their role during the night phase, but can you trust them? If two Masons come forward and verify each other as the Masons, are they truly Masons or just a pair of werewolves? What adds to this complexity is that, while the total number of each role is made clear, there are a handful of cards that occupy a space in the middle of the board, meaning that the true number of werewolves might just be one instead of two (or similarly, there might only be one Mason or less). All of these mechanics are built with Player-to-Player interaction in mind, as there are no objectives for a player to pursue beyond that of accumulating knowledge during the night phase in order to utilize that knowledge as a resource in a future deliberation phase.
An addition to this game that I really enjoyed were mechanics introduced by the Drunk, Robber, Troublemaker, and Insomniac roles. These roles are all really interesting because they are centered around another mechanic in One Night: the switching of roles during the night phase, which adds to the confusion during the deliberation phase. The Drunk swaps their own card with one from the middle but does not get to check what their new role is, the robber switches with another player and does get to check their new role, and so on. This can lead to complex deduction situations, for example, I might not want to reveal immediately that I am the Seer or the knowledge I gained as the Seer because what if my card got switched and I am now a werewolf? If that information gets revealed, and the ex-werewolf points at me claiming they were a werewolf and now I have that card (making me a werewolf), I cannot make a logical rebuttal since I already revealed myself to have been the Seer. Let’s say as Seer, I inspected two of the cards in the middle that are not in play, and I see that the Drunkard is not in play. If I do not reveal myself earlier, I can claim that I am the Drunkard and swapped my card (and thus am not a werewolf) and no one else could contest that. This cascading chain of logical routes and mental games of cat and mouse are what emerge from mechanics introduced by One Night, and I think they make for a wonderful social deduction game.
