The idea
If you play werewolf, you know it: someone has to be the game master and can’t play. At night, rustling and pointing give away who has which role. Special rules get forgotten, and cards go missing. Whowolf tries to solve all of that with the phones that are lying on the table anyway, without losing the best part of the game: sitting across from each other and looking each other in the eye.
Werewolf itself is a folk game. It goes back to “Mafia”, which was created in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and belongs to nobody. Whowolf doesn’t reinvent it; it brings it to the phone and adds ideas of its own, such as sheep counting and the wolf trail.
The name
Whowolf is a pun on “Who? Wolf”, the question everything revolves around, and werewolf. It is easy to say in both English and German.
Open source
The complete source code is public on GitHub, under the Apache 2.0 licence. That means anyone may read it, change it, share it and run it themselves. Every decision, every rule and the security design can be read there too.
Whowolf is a small project, open to anyone who wants to join in: with test rounds and feedback, role ideas, translations or code. Questions and suggestions are welcome on GitHub.
Own figures, own texts
All names, texts and graphics in Whowolf were made for it. There are no cards, images or rule texts from commercial werewolf editions, and Whowolf is not affiliated with any of them.
The cardboard figures in the “moon stage” style, a puppet theatre by moonlight, are original designs. They were created with an image generator, and how each image came about is documented.
What Whowolf never wants to be
- No account, no sign-up, no email.
- No ads, no subscription, no in-app purchases.
- No trackers, no analytics, neither in the app nor on this website.
What comes next
Right now, the test version is being tried out in real rounds. After that come the wolf trail, more roles and playing in the browser. Later, Whowolf is meant to appear in the App Store and on Google Play too. What is happening right now is in the roadmap (in German).