Critical Play: One Night Werewolf

That moment when you realize a game really wasn’t designed to be played via Zoom

I was beyond excited to see that One Night Werewolf was available on the netgames.io suite of games — I guess, that was until I realized that some games are meant to be played in person!

The Game: One Night Werewolf
Objectives: To start, players are assigned a card to describe their role. There are three cards at the center of the “table” with other roles. Some initially- assigned roles are swapped with cards around the “room” or with the cards on the table. In the course of one night, anyone assigned to be a werewolf has to select one person to kill. At the end of the night, each player votes for one player to kill based. One Night Werewolf splits players into two teams: Team Villager team and Team Werewolf. Team Villager wins if they kill at least one werewolf or, if there are no werewolves on a given round, to ensure no one dies; Team Werewolf wins if no werewolves are killed.

Players: There were a variety of roles outside of just a “Villager” and “Werewolf,” including a “Drunk,” “Robber,” and other roles, a feature I thought was a nice way to make the game more dynamic. For example, the “Drunk” role would randomly switch their role with a random card in the center, which could, in the course of the night, make them a werewolf! I drew this role, but found myself frustrated that I got a Villager card, which didn’t allow me to do anything extra besides twiddle my thumbs. And thumb-twiddling, well — there was a lot of that in this version of the game. This leads me to our next section, aka, “EPIC FAILS”:

• EPIC FAIL #1: When night falls, players are prompted to tap their phone occasionally and pretend to scroll, supposedly presuming that everyone could examine body language of others. This wasn’t the case a) playing via a browser and b) via Zoom! There was no way anyone could read the body language of others and trick others into thinking your role might be swapping, that you might be choosing a player to kill, etc.

• EPIC FAIL#2: Because we couldn’t read anyone’s body language for any cues, we had an agonizingly long wait time for night to end, and no information to base our voting decisions on. To add to this, there was no way to “fast-forward” the time, either, so we filled out time twiddling our thumbs and catching up about non-game-related updates.

> TWIDDLES THUMBS<

• EPIC FAIL #3: And this was maybe “my bad.” Conditioned by my knowledge of multiple-round, in-person werewolf, I wasn’t expecting the game to end, well, after one night. So, when the gameplay ended abruptly after we cast our votes, it left us with a big “Now what?”

All in all:

It’s a “no” from us!

A big “thumbs-down” for confusing gameplay, poor user interface, agonizing wait time, and messing up my relationship with a game I love to play in person! :( WAH!

Takeaways: Games for the digital space should clearly describe the optimal player setup and technologies needed. Even if a game is available across platforms, it’s important to consider what features are lost when a game is played on a browser vs. phone. In the case of this version of One Night Werewolf, the ideal setup would be to have everyone in the same room and on their phones, versus meeting via Zoom and on their desktop.