Game of the Week Reflection: Ultimate Werewolf

Ultimate Werewolf was the perfect way to start Tabletop Games and Leadership. The hardest part of this game was trust. Everyone had their own role and they were all trying to figure out and accuse those who were their enemies. This in turn caused the students to become overly skeptical and defensive, which is how the game now functions. It’s almost every man for himself situation because you can’t trust anyone else except for yourself. Because of this, trust is the main issue when it comes to an individual win.

This game ties into leadership because the followers blindly trust the leader. What I mean by this is once someone deviates from the main group and votes, others will subconsciously vote for that same person because they now start to follow the majority. This may not be a fair psychological way of going about things, but it is the way how people get voted out. My personal opinion on this is that it can turn the tables if there is one confident leader with devoted followers blindly agreeing with confidence at its core. There are also other leadership factors such as the person who got naturally selected to have a certain card. This can dictate the power the person automatically obtains in the game.

Overall, the session went well but was also a little chippy. There are a lot of moving parts with synergies to different characters and situations that it was difficult to grasp the concept on my first go around. There was a lot of risk in not consciously knowing who you picked and whether or not that person was a positive or negative target in the end. It’s hard to escape this however because this game is all about that risk. There is no definite answer to a multitude of things until it’s nearly too late. This, however, is similar to taking leadership. There is no finite answer to if your leadership will take off and you play that risk knowing that, which makes a good leader if you have the confidence and the consciousness to take on that feat. Logical and critically thinking people such as my uncle for example would like this game not only because of its medieval theme but also because of the thought-provoking actions that occur as well. Overall, I personally enjoyed this game and would definitely take part again.