One Night Ultimate Werewolf

One Night Ultimate Werewolf: 3 - 10 players - Ages 8 plus - 10 minutes

Game Play: You start by passing out role cards to everyone playing and then place three additional role cards in the center of the table. Once everyone looks at their cards the game begins and the "night phase" starts. During the night phase, the werewolves learn each others identities and then the villagers take certain actions depending on their role. (Including but not limited to peeking at cards, switching other players cards, or switching roles.) Once certain role's night actions take place, the day phase beings.

During the day phase, players can say anything they want but they cannot look at their role card. Their card may have been switched during the night phase and they will not know unless they can detect the deception of other players. At the end of the discussion, each player votes by pointing, at the same time, at who they want to "kill". The werewolves win by staying alive. The villagers win if at least one werewolf dies or if no one is a werewolf (remember the 3 extra cards in the middle) and no one dies.

Review: I played this game with several adult friends and it was a big hit. The rules are easy to explain and very quick to pick up. You can download a free app from the app store to be the narrator for you; which is what I did. The hard part is keeping everyone quiet enough to hear the instructions. The other hard part is not hearing who is moving cards around during the night phase. The group eventually came to the consensus that after each instruction, everyone would make a slight amount of noise to disguise if someone was moving things around.

Once the night phase was over the app began a countdown timer. This was good because it kept the game moving and got people talking. We started by going around the table and announcing our roles but we only got about halfway through the group before accusations started flying about who was a werewolf. This phase was fun and the only people that did not get involved much were the people that had the "villager" role. The villager does not have any instructions during the "night phase" and does not have any special powers. Most of the time the werewolf claimed to be a villager so it became easier to determine who was a werewolf by determining who was claiming to be a villager.

The vote and the "killing" of the players was very exciting and lots of yelling was involved. My group played this three times before moving on to something else.

Title screen from the free app

Overall: This is a good game for a group of people that are familiar with each other. The more familiar you are, the better the game will be. I highly recommend playing with the free app as some of the roles (Doppelganger) can get slightly confusing during the night phase and the app does all the thinking for you.

Who will like this game? Good liars, extroverts, close friends, quick thinkers


Who will not: Bad liars, introverts, people that like structure