In week 1, our group of roughly 25 players, were able to play a fun group game called Ultimate Werewolf. I enjoy the social deduction games because you are able to put pieces together and try to catch someone slipping up in the act and I enjoy the mystery and secrecy that comes along with this game. I think this is a great group game where anybody can pick it up in a few rounds, and I could definitely seeing me and my family playing a version of this. I enjoy the multiple roles involved and the different personalities that each person has to play in order to successfully complete their tasks.
While adding more and more roles into the game may spice things up, it may be very confusing to new players. This was me. While I got the gist of what people could do, it was very easy to forget what other players roles were which made piecing together who is who a whole lot harder. Luckily, I was given the plain old villager role so I didn’t have any actions that I needed to worry about right away and I could just sit back and watch how people interacted with other players. Unfortunately, I was killed off very early which meant that I couldn’t play anymore, but it did help to watch the rest of the game and how each role is played from an outside perspective. In the end, it became difficult for the good team to come together to vote out the werewolves. I believe the apprentice seer was able to point out 1 or 2 of the werewolves but each night he was silenced and wasn’t able to communicate to the others that he had that information.
There is a big function of leadership that is involved in a good round of Ultimate Werewolf. This mostly happens during the day where players interact with each other to figure out who is the bad guys and who are the good guys. With a big group of people it is a little difficult to figure out who is what role right away, and with the majority of players staying silent because they don’t have any intel, this leaves space for some leadership to evolve in those who have strategies of talking to people to see if they would spill their role. There are also leadership roles in the werewolf team where they have to work together to vote to kill one person, and with 4 different players being apart of the team it is difficult to point out just one person to kill off.