I’m teaching English in Italy and thought “werewolves” (for obvious reasons I’m not going to go with the version that is called "mafia :eek:) would be a great way for people to practice their English fluency. I recently played it in Italian, which I am learning myself, and it is a great way to practice speaking as it provides a strong motivation to use your language skills. They are a very smart and fun adult group with intermediate English skills who I think would enjoy the game.
However, as I have limited time and people’s languages skills aren’t perfect I would like to avoid getting bogged down in explaining various rules and roles that might confuse people, so I’m trying to pare it down to the essentials. I do still want people to get the strategy/game-playing/psychological warfare element of the game otherwise there’s no point. I’ve actually only played a few times myself, so I’m calling on the more experienced gameplayers:
What is the minimum nr of roles that would still yield a fun game? Please bear in mind that it is most students’ first time, so they aren’t jaded yet. Could I get away with only wolves and villagers? One clairvoyant? What do you think?
What is the minimum nr of people for a satisfying game? The group officially has ten people and normally eight to ten attend, but on an off night it could be as low as six. I will have a “plan B” lesson ready, but at which number do you it becomes pointless?
I would say the minimum for a game is 7. The basic 7 person game is known as C9 over at the MafiaScum community. (“C9” has something to do with the Hexadecimal representation of the various role distribution possiblities if you represented the absence or presence of a role in Binary notation.) It’s also the minimum number I’ve ever played with, both in real life and online.
You have 2 mafia/werewolves and 5 town. And town usually has a doctor or an investigator. Giving them both makes town very powerful. Giving them neither makes scum very powerful. Note, though, that any of those four setups shows up in C9.
But with less than 7 players, the game won’t work very well. Unless you use one scum who has special powers to balance out the town strength in numbers. Because using 2 scum will give them a cakewalk with less than 5 town against them.
The true minimum is 3. 2 villagers and one werewolf. One day No night.
Hoopy refers to online games which are quite different in form and execution as real-time, face-to-face games. For face-to-face, you can dispense with the extras all-together, though that can be frustrating for new players depending on their aggressiveness. What you get in face-to-face games is real-time interrogation. i.e., look 'em in the eye and figure out if they are lying. Therefore, I feel a functional investigator is not as necessary as in the online version. Another benefit of removing the detective is it relieves the need for processing the action at Night, which is significantly more complicated face-to-face than the anonymity provided by online PM.
2 villagers versus 1 werewolf
5 or 6 villagers versus 2 werewolves
should work out fine.
You don’t want a large group as the game drags, and the ‘dead’ players get bored.
All vanilla, 5 villagers vs. 2 werewolves is skewed pretty heavily in favor of the wolves. With a Detective, 5 vs. 2 gives the Detective way too much weight, and the game ends up being won by power role rather than by deduction/bluffing. Deciding randomly whether or not to have a detective, as in C9, basically boils down to flipping a coin to decide who’s going to have the unfair advantage. I suspect that if you looked at the history of C9 games, that Town would win the significant majority of games with a Detective, and Scum would win the significant majority of games without.
For a pure vanilla game, I would consider the bare minimum to be 8 Town vs. 2 Scum. That gives nearly 50-50 odds for unskilled play, which means that the game is probably going to be won by skill.
Very much a Mafia/Werewolves newbie, here, as I have only played a basic version a few times IRL, and not at all on-line. Based on this experience, I can confirm that a live game with simply 2 werewolves and 8 villagers works well - I wouldn’t do it every week, but once every few weeks should be fine.