What it is about
You sit together and you are a village. A few of you are secretly werewolves. At night they take a villager; by day they sit at the table and act innocent. The village talks, suspects and votes every day on whom to remove from the game.
- The village wins when no werewolf is left alive.
- The werewolves win when they are at least as many as everyone else still alive.
Werewolf works from 3 players, gets really good from 5, and up to 20 fit at one table. About one player in four is a werewolf, at least one.
Before the game: dealing the roles
Everyone gets a secret role. In Whowolf it appears only on their own phone, so there are no role cards. The werewolves also learn who else is in their pack. Everyone else only knows what they are themselves.
Besides villagers and werewolves there are roles with a special ability: the seer, the witch, the hunter and cupid. If you like, the village also elects a mayor. The host picks the roles in the settings.
The night
The village falls asleep. In the classic night everyone closes their eyes, and the narrator calls the roles one after another:
- Cupid, only in the first night: he links two players as lovers.
- The werewolves: they agree on a victim. In the end the pack’s majority counts; if it is a tie, nobody dies that night.
- The seer: she looks into one player and learns their role.
- The witch: she sees whom the werewolves took and may heal them or poison someone else.
Whoever is called picks up their phone; everyone else keeps their eyes closed. A role that is already dead is still called briefly, so nobody can tell from the pace who is missing.
In Whowolf’s night, everyone taps at the same time instead. Whoever has no night action counts sheep or makes a neutral pick. So from the outside nobody can see who is choosing a victim.
The day
In the morning the app announces who died in the night. Depending on the settings, their role is revealed. Then the village talks: who was suspiciously quiet, who steers suspicion onto others, who defends whom? The discussion has a time that fits the size of the table.
The vote
Then every living player votes in the app. Whoever gets the most votes is out. On a tie, your setting decides: either nobody is out, or there is a runoff between the tied players. If that ties again, nobody is out. Then night falls again.
The dead no longer play, vote or give anything away. Depending on the settings, as ghosts they see more than the living: every role, or even what happens at night.
What the app takes off your hands
With werewolf cards, somebody has to be the game master and sits out the whole evening. In Whowolf the app narrates: it deals the roles, calls the night, counts the votes, remembers every rule and has a clock for each phase so nobody gets stuck. Everyone plays, including whoever opened the room. They see no more than anyone else.
How a whole evening goes is in Plan a game night; answers to common questions are in Questions and answers.