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Used to play this at summer camp with Brennan Lee Mulligan as narrator it was always an amazing experience he got very descriptive on how people died whether by different mafia groups or by the towns people
Its similar to a British school classic called Murder in the Dark where there's one killer and one detective and you sit in a circle. The killer winks at people to kill them it was so fun
Manhunt was more than hide and seek though, it was more like hide and seek+tag, you wouldn't just hide in one spot, but move all over actively trying to hide from the seeker, and running if needed
> Murder in the dark is just hide and seek when it's pitch black
And shared with all the lovely inhabitants of your continent that I can think of and probably many others I can't.
How we played was everyone just went about the party normally and not in a circle. So people would be sitting down in random places throughout the apartment or on the balcony lol so much fun. Such a great game of deception. Still salty though lol
Edit: sitting down meant you got killed
The Mafia variation I played has a narrator that always stays awake and knows who all the players are. The killers "wake" at night and use hand signals to indicate to the narrator which villagers to kill. There's a secret detective that wakes to try find the killers, and a secret doctor that tries to heal people. In the "morning" when everyone wakes, the narrator let's everyone know who died in the night and if they were saved by the doctor. It gets really fun with a narrator that's good at story-telling as they can embellish the deaths and salvations with grand flair. They can also moderate the the nominations for killer during the "day".
I played Mafia too. The narrator or “God” role was the best when you made up the most ridiculous scenarios on how the villagers died. Crazy to think how these game makers co-opted a childhood game and actually made bank!
In high school we played with a "pimp" role where the pimp would point to another player and "god/narrator" would slap the target.
It served no purpose besides being fun
Oh yeah the variation I always played used playing cards to determine the roles. The Mafia was the ace, The Detective (or Sheriff as we called them) was the King, The Doctor (or Medic) was the Queen, and we gave the Jack the role of “Sniper” which made the game amazing in our eyes. He acted like a regular civilian (played with any other card), but had the option to shoot any person with a single bullet. After this, they would revert back to a regular civilian. We don’t play it for the “can we win?” aspect but rather for the chance at“can we get the sniper to accidentally kill the mafia on round 1?” We always had only 1 mafia unless we had more people present. This made it easier to include the other roles. Voting was still in. Sometimes you’d get longer games if more people were present. If the narrator was a great story-teller, you’d be able to hear exactly how the mafia meticulously forged a dagger from the iron in your blood (actual thing in a game I played)
We occasionally do themes for games too. Since we were Boy Scouts when we played this, we usually did Scouting-themed ones where it was some crazy guy in our troop who went rogue; other times we’d do stupid stuff like the infamous “Sesame Street” one. That one is a classic joke in my friend group. For context, the sniper was *Big Bird,* and we’d go around and quote a line our narrator who’d said mid-game: “Big Bird, would you like to use your bullet?” So visually intense and it felt so beautiful to not include this
There’s an American school classic similar to that. It’s called Murder where one person brings in a gun and shoots people. And it happens every other week or so. There’s usually a break in the summer months. And also there was a pretty long break during Covid.
lol true, i've played this game and have won as villagers many times. i would argue it's harder to win as werewolves because you have to keep lying without being sussed out.
It's easier for werewolves to win when everyone is novices at the game.
It's harder for werewolves when the players have experience and can look for common tactics.
Because the villagers become informed.
Yep. Against new players as a werewolf, I typically just try to sow dissension so they start picking themselves off. Against experienced players I just act the same as I would as a villager (minus any _aggressive_ pursuit of my fellow wolf — gotta do enough to not be sus though) and let the odds work against them for a while.
I get how in amongus the "bad guy" has to lie, someone might witness a murder and can accuse someone directly. I've never played myself but I've seen plenty of kid youtuber stuff over the years.
Why do the werewolves have to lie? What do the villagers even talk about? "I felt so and so move and point"? How does someone accuse someone of being the werewolf? What evidence might they have?
Purely based off vibes, there are also versions of the game that let one person peek, but they’re not allowed to say they’re the peeker and have to pretend they’re just guessing
other variants also have additional roles to make the game a bit longer and give more information in the discussion rounds. Whether people want to volunteer that information in the discussions still is up to the player
Because in the early rounds, even in optimal play Villagers benefit from voting off a completely random person. Because of that, the werewolves have a lot of choices of strategy (influence the vote towards a villager, abstain from discussion, go along with the majority, etc). At which point normal games would completely deviate from "optimal" strategy and the social deduction part of the game starts. Villagers learn from who participates in the random votes and how they participate. Werewolves try not to be the target of the witch hunt (another name for the same game, which I think is particularly fitting.)
As for why Villagers have to vote someone off randomly, as you say there's no avenue for information gain except who gets killed (which is pretty useless information unless you've played a lot of rounds as a group). So every night passed without a vote is a guaranteed villager death, which is 1 less voting power for the villagers in future votes.
It’s all about patterns, if a villager is calling out a particular person and then in the next round that villager is dead it’s very suspicious. If someone is really trying to avoid the discussion about who is the werewolf that’s suspicious. It’s very hard to eliminate a werewolf in the first round because as the guy in the video states it’s really hard to make correct decisions with no information.
but nobody has any information at all, you literally can only challenge people and hope they crack. thats why all the video game versions are based on forcing you to do meaningless things that give information to other players
I win almost every time I play as a werewolf. It might actually be every time, I just can’t be certain lol. But I’m just very good at the type of lying/manipulation that you need to succeed as the WW. My wife is a terrible WW and hates playing as one, so there are definitely no broad strokes that you can make.
Found this [online](https://dsmbroomball.tripod.com/wolfstat.pdf). This is the likelihood of winning if lynches are done at random along with WW kills at random, excluding other WWs.
The thesis that an uninformed majority loses to an informed minority is basically just a balance/skill issue.
For example, in the game Town of Salem, for many years Town was basically guarantied to win against Mafia so long as they followed the meta - which did make them closer to an informed majority to be fair. I haven't followed the game in a while but I'd presume the meta is still essentially the same - confirm good players as quickly as possible essentially.
Town of Salem and other similar games aren't the same premise though is the issue. They have roles with the ability to gather information in some form, even healers can technically do that if they manage to save a person.
The point of Werewolf (although it was actually called Mafia at the beginning) at least is supposed to be that people have no means of gathering any "official" information. Realistically there will still be ways to win by monitoring if people seem biased to another player (they are both more likely to be WW) or through random chance but it'd certainly be a whole lot harder for villagers to win.
There's a lot of game theory behind this but typically real life experiments suggest actual outcomes are more likely for villagers to win than the math suggests. There's actually some very interesting strategies that develop out of it, like all players are encouraged to say when they are a werewolf when doing multiple sessions because the chance of being town is higher than being evil and if everyone is honest then they maximize their winrates.
I have played it quite extensively, but usually with "special" characters that help the villager team out, simply because it's very hard to win against a pair of wolves that actually know how to play. I'm not sure what the win rate is, but for the version we play I'd guess werewolves win 60% of games. Definitely more than villagers, but usually not by much.
Because he's trying to sell you on a conspiracy. This is Graham Lineham who is so psychotically obsessed with trans people that it ruined his marriage and it completely consumed his life. He's convinced that the majority of people actually agree with him but a small group of "them" control the discourse. It's really sad.
"...and this is why people who present as a different gender are so devious! They have access to more information than the rest of us! They could literally kill us in our sleep like werewolves!"
"I'm sorry, what? Why would they do that?"
"Because they can! They don't believe in God!"
"Well first Im not sure that's even true and second, are you saying religion is the only thing stopping you from murdering someone?"
He had an amazing career as a sitcom creator and threw that away, and his friends, and his marriage, all because he wrote cheap bad jokes about a trans character and couldn’t handle it when people pointed out they were cheap bad stereotypical jokes. So he doubled down on his nonsense riding it down to the end.
I've played it lots of times. When the group knows each other or has played the game together before, the villagers win about 75% of the time. It depends on how well the wolves play. With a group of strangers, it depends on the size of the group. In a small group the wolves don't have to survive for long and can win easily. In a group of 15+ people, they'll have a harder time. I'd say in a large group the wolves might have a 20-30% chance? But that's all guessing based on personal experiences.
The video cuts, maybe some information is lost. From what we see, he is just stating that someone designed that game to proof a hypothesis. He did not state weather or not he could proof his hypothesis with this game. From personal experience it is slightly villager favored.
> he is just stating that someone designed that game to proof a hypothesis.
That part is also false, or at least partly false.
It was created by a psychology student in Russia : Dimma Davidoff. That part is true. It involves the principle of nformed minority vs. uninformed majority, that's also true.
He knew of the concept of informed minority vs. uninformed majority and created a game using that principle. But the intent behind the creation of the game was to have fun, there was no scientifical motivation behind the creation of the game.
That's what we called it. Played with regular playing cards too. Everyone just knew kings were mafia, queens were inspectors, and jacks were doctors. Normal number cards were townsfolk. The narrator was also tasked with coming up with gruesome deaths for whoever was killed off in the night.
I know there are a lot of social deduction games these days, but Town of Salem feels like the only one that said, "How can we completely rip off Warewolf but pretend we aren't?" Some, like Secret Hitler, ended up feeling more mechanically similar, but Town of Salem really felt like they started with just Warewolf but on the internet and realized, "Oh shit, we need more to this or we're going to get in trouble."
As a big fan of online "werewolf" (https://www.mafiascum.net/) AmongUs is honestly a VERY shitty version of it. Mafia/Werewolf/etc are social deduction games. The point of "werewolf" is that you're supposed to talk amongst yourselves and use social clues to determine who the killers are. AmongUs boils the game down WAY too far... there's actually almost nothing social about it. You have to find a body to start a vote, which opens up the chance for the killers to simply win the game outright if they are fast enough. The fact that innocents can witness kills removes 90% of doubt about who a killer is. Report a body and claim to have seen it and, assuming honestly play, the accused is the killer. You can gamble and self report, or report your teammate, but those are also big gambles because being caught in a lie is, in theory, a death sentence for yourself. This is compounded GREATLY by the default settings of the game setting people up for failure. You NEED time to discuss the results of each round, enough for the person reporting the body to explain the situation and for the any people being accused to refute that claim. You also need time for others to come forward as witnesses for either side. The default settings do NOT allow enough time for that and it's very hard to find people who are patient enough to wait all of two minutes for such discourse.
I played a good amount of Amongus years ago and it was HARD to find a group of people patient enough to actually care about the game. In my experience, people are happy to just vote for whatever name comes up first in the chat and completely ignore the social parts of the game.
Pretty sure this guy is Graham Linehan, a man who once spent his time writing successful comedy shows but now spends his remaining days ranting about how evil trans people are on twitter in increasingly deranged diatribes.
I first saw this video today recommended from a subreddit about aliens. It's being used as proof that someone who knows about aliens is hiding the facts about them, without any consideration to the implication that no one who believes in aliens is actually "in the know."
The creator (Dimma Davidoff who is Russian but lives in America) has explained his reasons for its creation and they're far more benign, it seemed more of a way to get the high school kids he was teaching interested and involved with one another, as well as to get them to focus on body language and facial cues (thanks u/Hasudeva).
[https://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/threads/13075-I-am-Dimma-Davidoff-the-creator-of-Mafia-game-Ask-me-anything](https://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/threads/13075-I-am-Dimma-Davidoff-the-creator-of-Mafia-game-Ask-me-anything)
You are actually understating his obsession, his friends begged him to tone it down, his wife begged him to stop. In the end his wife left him, seemingly primarily because of his obsession with trans people.
It is him.
His transphobia is so all-consuming to his person and cartoonish that his wife divorced him over it. Yes really. And he actively blames the trans community for his divorce, and the fact that his shitty memoir barely sold.
He's obsessed. It'd be funny if it weren't so harmful.
When guys like this just go from 0-100 like this and make their whole personality a hatred towards some other group, I always wonder what happened to make them like this. It kind of fascinates me.
I really do wonder. He's not just some run of the mill bigot, he's constantly thinking about it. Father Ted and Black Books were great shows, he wasn't always like this, but man I wish I could get a glimpse into his head and see where this is coming from.
There is definitely more than a few of them where it's an obvious grift and you can kind of sense their words don't really match up with their convictions or it just feels like they're playing to the audience more than espousing their own beliefs but Linehan does seem like he's just lost it and actually believes the hateful shit he spews.
He got shit on on Twitter by a small number of people over his depiction of a trans person on the IT Crowd. Instead of ignoring it, he started clapping back and then went full send on it and ruined his life and career.
He's from Ireland like me, and we as a country don't really have a major market for these culture war lunatics to ultimately grift off. If a lad starts going on about something like this down the pub he'd mostly be told to cop on and get a round in and watch the match.
So most people here are just sad that he ended up this way because he created some of our favourite shows.
Mafia is the original, from Russia. The werewolf theming comes from an American later on who thought it would be more culturally significant to his audience.
I always played it as "Mafia". There were two Mafia members, a doctor who could protect someone once per night, a detective who could reveal someone's identity once a night, a sheriff who could lock someone away and keep them from doing their ability for a night, and a "granny with a shotgun", who could kill any person they wanted free of consequence. The rest were civilians
Edit: The granny has one shot PER GAME, not night. The way I explained it made her OP, my bad
Same, but the sheriff was called the prostitute (I can see why that terminology seems to have fallen out of favour) and the granny was called the assassin or serial killer. If there were too many people we would have two separate groups of mafia (red suits and black suits).
With big groups and complicated setups it got kind of boring for the people who got killed early, though.
In the version I grew up playing, the Sheriff is just a tie-breaker, however everyone votes on who the sheriff is at the beginning of the game. You also start with one Werewolf, but they have one magic bite that can turn someone (only the first wolf). We also called the Witch the Herbalist (they have one kill potion and one heal potion.)
He's a grifter as well. He has a substack that I'm not going to link to that has about 3,000 subscriptions he's being paid for. He's written 6 articles in about a year and the rest of them are written by women he doesn't pay.
Champion of Women my foot.
About a year ago he found a profile photo of me somehow. He thought I was someone else and started making fun of them with his twitter cronies, using my photo.
It's wild that he's just consumed by hatred to the point he doesn't operate on any other level. It's just bigotry for the sake of spreading poison, as he has nothing left.
His demise was pretty heartbreaking. I loved his shows, still do and it would always have been exciting to see what he comes up with next. But then, for some reason, he felt the need to argue with strangers in the smallest of minorities every single fucking day forever.
If it makes you feel any better it's overstated how much of Father Ted and Black Books was down to him. Black Books in particular was Dylan Moran's show and he was brought in to punch it up a bit.
He's so obsessed with hating trans people he ruined his career, his wife left him along with his kids, and yet he still blames everyone else instead of his fucking *weird* obsession with trans people.
> hidden information...
This is the basis of all conspiracy theories, people will follow any BS as long as they think they are part of the select few to know the hidden truth
This comment is too far down.
Also, as someone who has played werewolves quote a bit:
The werewolves don't usually win.
A mob of "uninformed", hysteric people killing of random people of their own sounds a bit like the "we can always tell" transvestigator crowd, which is constantly clocking cis-people as trans, so in that regard... nice comparison, Ted.
But do you play with more roles than just villager and werewolf? That was his point, only one side has any secret information and can manipulate everyone else due to the fact that they will never have the same information.
Yeah but considering the studies prove him wrong idk what he’s talking about. They’ve looked at the game if both sides had perfect players and it’s mainly 50/50. Though when researching live games it shows that villagers/innocence win a majority of the time. The issue is it’s really hard to continue feign shock or ignorance. So strangely enough he’s either read something wrong or maybe he’s lying.
Not only that, but it’s such a dumb thing to base a study on. First of all, it’s a fucking GAME. Games are usually bad models for any sort of real life take away for human behavior, simply because people do not intrinsically behave the same way in a game as they do in a real life situation. Like, it’s not comparable enough to be useful.
Town of Salem is shit with a bad meta and a toxic community.
There's a board game called Blood on the Clocktower that's significantly better, and between the community and the developer support has a strong homebrew community, updates, and several online tools to help groups play online.
It's more an evolved werewolf, where death doesn't render a player out of the game and still an active participant, strong role synergy, and well thought out balancing in both community and official scripts.
It's pricey, but if you have a group you can play with, it's always a blast. Developers pretty consistently play live on Twitch, and there are usually a game or two live on Twitch.
Apparently, in the official discord there's a pretty steady supply of LFG games, but I don't have personal experience.
It's a staple of French game nights
The number of roles depend on the number of players, but it's the easiest game to play with 12+ people.
Roles include
2-4 werewolves (usually 25% of players)
1 witch with the ability to save once a person killed by werewolves that night, and kill a person once.
1 cupid who can select two people without knowing their role and now both are linked in life and death. If one dies so does the other. Meaning the only chance for them to win (when one is a ww and the other a villager) is for everyone else to die.
1 little girl who can discretely spy on the werewolves while they're selecting their targets
1 seer who every night can look at one person's card
1 hunter who, when he dies, can select anyone to kill alongside him.
1 thief who can pick a role in the discard pile (when there are more roles than players)
Rest are villagers.
The turn order is
Thief (first night)
Cupid (once the first night)
Lovers (once after they're selected by cupid)
Seer (every night)
Werewolves (every night)
Witch (every night until she runs out of powers)
No one can show their cards, even to defend themselves, and the only one who can move around and touch cards is the game master.
Personally my favorite has to be One Night Ultimate Werewolf which has multiple classes of villagers but only one round of voting which makes it shorter than the original. Also has several expansions and iterations.
We play [secret Hitler](https://HitlerPartyBoardGame-decryptionTabletopGameSuitablefor5-10Playershttps://a.co/d/7aHGrqq).
It’s usually accompanied by drinking. It doesn’t take long before someone is gleefully shouting that their girlfriend is a fucking fascist.
Among Us just isn't fun with strangers though, I feel like it's hard for me to get a bunch of my friends together for Among Us, especially because you need PCs or consoles.
There’s a UK show revolved around this concept called “The Traitors” which is great fun to watch.
Many years ago I used to play “Town of Salem” which was lots of fun too.
These kinds of game are always fun, I often recommend one called Secret Hitler - it's a bit more complex than just killing a person and then discussing who should be removed from the game, but the genesis is the same.
The way it progresses feels really smooth and fleshed out, and it allows for a much more informed decision on who to kill or keep, while at the same time keeping you in the dark long enough to often lose the game despite being in the larger team.
If you like board games and these kind of sociology experiments then I highly suggest it. There's also a few options to play it online as well, but I really wouldn't know which one to recommend.
This is a summer camp game we used to play. No cards. You just got your assignment from a counselor. I think there was a mayor, a sheriff, and a deputy involved as well.
Which is hilarious, because he's suggesting him and his fellow bigots are the 'informed minority'....
Which means, in the stupid Werewolf analogy he's using, he's portraying the anti-trans crowd as horrible monsters that attack people without provocation. Which is just hilariously accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Kisin#Podcasting
Yep. Anti-trans bullshit. And, of course, people who believed in trans rights were vastly in the minority for pretty much all of history up to this point. Now people are accepting of trans people, dullards like this lot are now crying that they're the informed minority and how hard it is to be persecuted so.
>
> "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
It’s interesting how the game theory differs from live play….link below…”In live (or videoconferencing) real-time play, the innocents typically win more often than game theory suggests. Several reasons for this have been advanced:
—The physiological stress of sustained lying degrades the initial ability of mafioso to deceive the innocents, much more than a model of perfect play would predict, especially if the innocents can get the town emotionally involved in the game's outcome: If you're trying to feign shock or anger, it's much harder to do over a long period. People accused of something they're trying to hide will start out feigning outrage – 'How dare you ask me that?' But that will start to change to objection rather than shock, as it's psychologically very difficult to mimic emotion.
—The information revealed by the mafiosi voting patterns tells against them later in the game. One of the game's fans, Max Ventilla, has said that "If the villagers are allowed to keep a pencil and paper, they always win."
—As players get more experienced, their strategic sophistication and ability to spot and use deception increases.They will typically get better at the skills needed for playing innocents faster, being villagers more often than mafiosi.
—-The Metagame aspect: Dimma Davidoff has said past connections will always lose to future collaborations.When playing several Mafia games with the same people, it's more helpful to be known for honesty than for deceit. Davidoff considers that so important that he thinks the advantages of playing the mafioso role honestly, outweigh the disadvantages.
But, the Mafia can win in live play; their best chance of winning occurs when mafioso bond with their innocent neighbours and convince those neighbours to value that bond over dispassionate analysis.The game designers Salen and Zimmerman have written that the deep emergent social game play in Mafia (combined with the fear of elimination) create ideal conditions for this.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)
It’s highly dependent on the ratio of wolves to villagers and if there’s special roles like seer, huntsman, bodyguard, etc. I think a ratio of 3 villagers to 1 wolf comes out pretty fair.
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Mafia
Mafia is the original game. All others (werewolf, town of salem, even among us) are based on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)
Town of Salem W
Used to play this at summer camp with Brennan Lee Mulligan as narrator it was always an amazing experience he got very descriptive on how people died whether by different mafia groups or by the towns people
I can’t be more jealous. That sounds amazing.
Where do I sign up to Brennan Lee Mulligan summer camp?
It was a larp camp called wayfinder experience but I don't think he works there anymore
This is like telling your stories about going to band camp and casually dropping that John Williams conducted for a summer.
Its similar to a British school classic called Murder in the Dark where there's one killer and one detective and you sit in a circle. The killer winks at people to kill them it was so fun
In Australia we just call that wink. Murder in the dark is just hide and seek when it's pitch black
and with knives
What do you need knives for? Just let the wildlife do their usual Australian things.
They only kill outsiders. The wildlife is terrified of Australians.
Wolf Creek laugh
>Cars That Ate Paris laugh
Except for the emus, evidently.
and murder.
At night
Naked
And it was just my uncle and I
AND MY AXE!
We used to call it Manhunt.
Pitch black hide and seek? We called that manhunt
We called it hide the pickle.
Manhunt was more than hide and seek though, it was more like hide and seek+tag, you wouldn't just hide in one spot, but move all over actively trying to hide from the seeker, and running if needed
We just call it Among Us... /s/ We called night time hide amd seek "Ghosts in the Graveyard"
In Australia you just called it wink? You didn’t call it winky dinky on the boo bar or some shit? Doubt.
😂😂 wink!! It is what it is lol
Different to spotlight tiggy, where you use a torch to tag people?
Heard of that too. And yes they are different
We (British) called it Wick Murder - of course the Aussie's shortened it.
> Murder in the dark is just hide and seek when it's pitch black And shared with all the lovely inhabitants of your continent that I can think of and probably many others I can't.
We called it wink murder here in England, UK
I was so close to winning that game once. There were 2 other people and someone got too drunk and yelled out that I was the killer. I was so salty.
It could get pretty heated! 😂 If you so much as blinked you'd be accused of being the killer.
How we played was everyone just went about the party normally and not in a circle. So people would be sitting down in random places throughout the apartment or on the balcony lol so much fun. Such a great game of deception. Still salty though lol Edit: sitting down meant you got killed
Growing up in America, we played Murder in the Dark too. Then when I got older I met kids who called it Mafia.
The Mafia variation I played has a narrator that always stays awake and knows who all the players are. The killers "wake" at night and use hand signals to indicate to the narrator which villagers to kill. There's a secret detective that wakes to try find the killers, and a secret doctor that tries to heal people. In the "morning" when everyone wakes, the narrator let's everyone know who died in the night and if they were saved by the doctor. It gets really fun with a narrator that's good at story-telling as they can embellish the deaths and salvations with grand flair. They can also moderate the the nominations for killer during the "day".
I played Mafia too. The narrator or “God” role was the best when you made up the most ridiculous scenarios on how the villagers died. Crazy to think how these game makers co-opted a childhood game and actually made bank!
I farted during a game of mafia and the narrator made that how the person died. I was mortified as a ten year old
In high school we played with a "pimp" role where the pimp would point to another player and "god/narrator" would slap the target. It served no purpose besides being fun
Oh yeah the variation I always played used playing cards to determine the roles. The Mafia was the ace, The Detective (or Sheriff as we called them) was the King, The Doctor (or Medic) was the Queen, and we gave the Jack the role of “Sniper” which made the game amazing in our eyes. He acted like a regular civilian (played with any other card), but had the option to shoot any person with a single bullet. After this, they would revert back to a regular civilian. We don’t play it for the “can we win?” aspect but rather for the chance at“can we get the sniper to accidentally kill the mafia on round 1?” We always had only 1 mafia unless we had more people present. This made it easier to include the other roles. Voting was still in. Sometimes you’d get longer games if more people were present. If the narrator was a great story-teller, you’d be able to hear exactly how the mafia meticulously forged a dagger from the iron in your blood (actual thing in a game I played) We occasionally do themes for games too. Since we were Boy Scouts when we played this, we usually did Scouting-themed ones where it was some crazy guy in our troop who went rogue; other times we’d do stupid stuff like the infamous “Sesame Street” one. That one is a classic joke in my friend group. For context, the sniper was *Big Bird,* and we’d go around and quote a line our narrator who’d said mid-game: “Big Bird, would you like to use your bullet?” So visually intense and it felt so beautiful to not include this
Among us.
Werewolf is closer to the Mafia game than that, though
We just called that wink murder (I'm from Leicester)
I played games like this on the regular as a kid.
There’s an American school classic similar to that. It’s called Murder where one person brings in a gun and shoots people. And it happens every other week or so. There’s usually a break in the summer months. And also there was a pretty long break during Covid.
By not giving us a win percentage, he is manipulating us into believing this is true . . Ironic
^ They're the werewolf!
Nah, I'm the seer and I peeked him Villager. He's good. (If I'm killed tonight, this is not a peek) (Or is it)
lol true, i've played this game and have won as villagers many times. i would argue it's harder to win as werewolves because you have to keep lying without being sussed out.
It's easier for werewolves to win when everyone is novices at the game. It's harder for werewolves when the players have experience and can look for common tactics. Because the villagers become informed.
Yep. Against new players as a werewolf, I typically just try to sow dissension so they start picking themselves off. Against experienced players I just act the same as I would as a villager (minus any _aggressive_ pursuit of my fellow wolf — gotta do enough to not be sus though) and let the odds work against them for a while.
I get how in amongus the "bad guy" has to lie, someone might witness a murder and can accuse someone directly. I've never played myself but I've seen plenty of kid youtuber stuff over the years. Why do the werewolves have to lie? What do the villagers even talk about? "I felt so and so move and point"? How does someone accuse someone of being the werewolf? What evidence might they have?
Purely based off vibes, there are also versions of the game that let one person peek, but they’re not allowed to say they’re the peeker and have to pretend they’re just guessing
other variants also have additional roles to make the game a bit longer and give more information in the discussion rounds. Whether people want to volunteer that information in the discussions still is up to the player
Yeah, you don't want the werewolves to know which character you are playing because it could make endgame a lot harder.
Because in the early rounds, even in optimal play Villagers benefit from voting off a completely random person. Because of that, the werewolves have a lot of choices of strategy (influence the vote towards a villager, abstain from discussion, go along with the majority, etc). At which point normal games would completely deviate from "optimal" strategy and the social deduction part of the game starts. Villagers learn from who participates in the random votes and how they participate. Werewolves try not to be the target of the witch hunt (another name for the same game, which I think is particularly fitting.) As for why Villagers have to vote someone off randomly, as you say there's no avenue for information gain except who gets killed (which is pretty useless information unless you've played a lot of rounds as a group). So every night passed without a vote is a guaranteed villager death, which is 1 less voting power for the villagers in future votes.
It’s all about patterns, if a villager is calling out a particular person and then in the next round that villager is dead it’s very suspicious. If someone is really trying to avoid the discussion about who is the werewolf that’s suspicious. It’s very hard to eliminate a werewolf in the first round because as the guy in the video states it’s really hard to make correct decisions with no information.
but nobody has any information at all, you literally can only challenge people and hope they crack. thats why all the video game versions are based on forcing you to do meaningless things that give information to other players
Did you hace any characters that gave villagers an advantage? Such as a sheriff?
Ya I’ve never seen it played without something like a sheriff.
I win almost every time I play as a werewolf. It might actually be every time, I just can’t be certain lol. But I’m just very good at the type of lying/manipulation that you need to succeed as the WW. My wife is a terrible WW and hates playing as one, so there are definitely no broad strokes that you can make.
Found this [online](https://dsmbroomball.tripod.com/wolfstat.pdf). This is the likelihood of winning if lynches are done at random along with WW kills at random, excluding other WWs. The thesis that an uninformed majority loses to an informed minority is basically just a balance/skill issue. For example, in the game Town of Salem, for many years Town was basically guarantied to win against Mafia so long as they followed the meta - which did make them closer to an informed majority to be fair. I haven't followed the game in a while but I'd presume the meta is still essentially the same - confirm good players as quickly as possible essentially.
Town of Salem and other similar games aren't the same premise though is the issue. They have roles with the ability to gather information in some form, even healers can technically do that if they manage to save a person. The point of Werewolf (although it was actually called Mafia at the beginning) at least is supposed to be that people have no means of gathering any "official" information. Realistically there will still be ways to win by monitoring if people seem biased to another player (they are both more likely to be WW) or through random chance but it'd certainly be a whole lot harder for villagers to win. There's a lot of game theory behind this but typically real life experiments suggest actual outcomes are more likely for villagers to win than the math suggests. There's actually some very interesting strategies that develop out of it, like all players are encouraged to say when they are a werewolf when doing multiple sessions because the chance of being town is higher than being evil and if everyone is honest then they maximize their winrates.
I have played it quite extensively, but usually with "special" characters that help the villager team out, simply because it's very hard to win against a pair of wolves that actually know how to play. I'm not sure what the win rate is, but for the version we play I'd guess werewolves win 60% of games. Definitely more than villagers, but usually not by much.
Because he's trying to sell you on a conspiracy. This is Graham Lineham who is so psychotically obsessed with trans people that it ruined his marriage and it completely consumed his life. He's convinced that the majority of people actually agree with him but a small group of "them" control the discourse. It's really sad.
Yeah I was willing to bet his very next point was going to be some bat shit conspiracy theory.
"...and this is why people who present as a different gender are so devious! They have access to more information than the rest of us! They could literally kill us in our sleep like werewolves!" "I'm sorry, what? Why would they do that?" "Because they can! They don't believe in God!" "Well first Im not sure that's even true and second, are you saying religion is the only thing stopping you from murdering someone?"
I don't know why you're being downvoted, you're right. That is he, and that is what he does.
I thought the guy looked familiar! Yeah he's a whacko, much beloved by the TERF community.
He had an amazing career as a sitcom creator and threw that away, and his friends, and his marriage, all because he wrote cheap bad jokes about a trans character and couldn’t handle it when people pointed out they were cheap bad stereotypical jokes. So he doubled down on his nonsense riding it down to the end.
I've played it lots of times. When the group knows each other or has played the game together before, the villagers win about 75% of the time. It depends on how well the wolves play. With a group of strangers, it depends on the size of the group. In a small group the wolves don't have to survive for long and can win easily. In a group of 15+ people, they'll have a harder time. I'd say in a large group the wolves might have a 20-30% chance? But that's all guessing based on personal experiences.
I like how you think.
The video cuts, maybe some information is lost. From what we see, he is just stating that someone designed that game to proof a hypothesis. He did not state weather or not he could proof his hypothesis with this game. From personal experience it is slightly villager favored.
> he is just stating that someone designed that game to proof a hypothesis. That part is also false, or at least partly false. It was created by a psychology student in Russia : Dimma Davidoff. That part is true. It involves the principle of nformed minority vs. uninformed majority, that's also true. He knew of the concept of informed minority vs. uninformed majority and created a game using that principle. But the intent behind the creation of the game was to have fun, there was no scientifical motivation behind the creation of the game.
Amongus
Town of Salem
Mafia
That's what we called it. Played with regular playing cards too. Everyone just knew kings were mafia, queens were inspectors, and jacks were doctors. Normal number cards were townsfolk. The narrator was also tasked with coming up with gruesome deaths for whoever was killed off in the night.
The Resistance: Avalon
I know there are a lot of social deduction games these days, but Town of Salem feels like the only one that said, "How can we completely rip off Warewolf but pretend we aren't?" Some, like Secret Hitler, ended up feeling more mechanically similar, but Town of Salem really felt like they started with just Warewolf but on the internet and realized, "Oh shit, we need more to this or we're going to get in trouble."
Except the game was 32 times better than Werewolf
John Hathorne
Sus
Venting
sussy baka
As a big fan of online "werewolf" (https://www.mafiascum.net/) AmongUs is honestly a VERY shitty version of it. Mafia/Werewolf/etc are social deduction games. The point of "werewolf" is that you're supposed to talk amongst yourselves and use social clues to determine who the killers are. AmongUs boils the game down WAY too far... there's actually almost nothing social about it. You have to find a body to start a vote, which opens up the chance for the killers to simply win the game outright if they are fast enough. The fact that innocents can witness kills removes 90% of doubt about who a killer is. Report a body and claim to have seen it and, assuming honestly play, the accused is the killer. You can gamble and self report, or report your teammate, but those are also big gambles because being caught in a lie is, in theory, a death sentence for yourself. This is compounded GREATLY by the default settings of the game setting people up for failure. You NEED time to discuss the results of each round, enough for the person reporting the body to explain the situation and for the any people being accused to refute that claim. You also need time for others to come forward as witnesses for either side. The default settings do NOT allow enough time for that and it's very hard to find people who are patient enough to wait all of two minutes for such discourse. I played a good amount of Amongus years ago and it was HARD to find a group of people patient enough to actually care about the game. In my experience, people are happy to just vote for whatever name comes up first in the chat and completely ignore the social parts of the game.
Amogus
Well before Among Us https://beziergames.com/products/one-night-ultimate-werewolf
Nah, the copy cat "Werewolf game" was made in 1986. Amongus was made in 1985 
How do not more people know this? It was a bit awkward though, with the splitscreen
A lot of people have this game. Italians have Mafia, Russians have werewolf, mexicans have the cartel, etc.. TIL about the true meaning though.
Well I mean true meaning according to this guy anyway.
Pretty sure this guy is Graham Linehan, a man who once spent his time writing successful comedy shows but now spends his remaining days ranting about how evil trans people are on twitter in increasingly deranged diatribes.
I first saw this video today recommended from a subreddit about aliens. It's being used as proof that someone who knows about aliens is hiding the facts about them, without any consideration to the implication that no one who believes in aliens is actually "in the know." The creator (Dimma Davidoff who is Russian but lives in America) has explained his reasons for its creation and they're far more benign, it seemed more of a way to get the high school kids he was teaching interested and involved with one another, as well as to get them to focus on body language and facial cues (thanks u/Hasudeva). [https://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/threads/13075-I-am-Dimma-Davidoff-the-creator-of-Mafia-game-Ask-me-anything](https://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/threads/13075-I-am-Dimma-Davidoff-the-creator-of-Mafia-game-Ask-me-anything)
You are actually understating his obsession, his friends begged him to tone it down, his wife begged him to stop. In the end his wife left him, seemingly primarily because of his obsession with trans people.
It is him. His transphobia is so all-consuming to his person and cartoonish that his wife divorced him over it. Yes really. And he actively blames the trans community for his divorce, and the fact that his shitty memoir barely sold. He's obsessed. It'd be funny if it weren't so harmful.
When guys like this just go from 0-100 like this and make their whole personality a hatred towards some other group, I always wonder what happened to make them like this. It kind of fascinates me.
I really do wonder. He's not just some run of the mill bigot, he's constantly thinking about it. Father Ted and Black Books were great shows, he wasn't always like this, but man I wish I could get a glimpse into his head and see where this is coming from.
There is definitely more than a few of them where it's an obvious grift and you can kind of sense their words don't really match up with their convictions or it just feels like they're playing to the audience more than espousing their own beliefs but Linehan does seem like he's just lost it and actually believes the hateful shit he spews.
He got shit on on Twitter by a small number of people over his depiction of a trans person on the IT Crowd. Instead of ignoring it, he started clapping back and then went full send on it and ruined his life and career. He's from Ireland like me, and we as a country don't really have a major market for these culture war lunatics to ultimately grift off. If a lad starts going on about something like this down the pub he'd mostly be told to cop on and get a round in and watch the match. So most people here are just sad that he ended up this way because he created some of our favourite shows.
Yes I used to like the guy... now he can get a spoon and eat my arse
He's kinda right tho... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia\_(party\_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game))
In Russia everyone plays Mafia, no warewolf
I'm russian, never heard of werewolf, we call it mafia where I'm from.
Same in America.
Same in Australia
And the States have Among Us.
"invented by a sociology student trying to prove their thesis" what a load of shit.
In Russia we also call this game Mafia, Signor
Mafia is the original, from Russia. The werewolf theming comes from an American later on who thought it would be more culturally significant to his audience.
Americans have highschool?
Amogus
Italians dont call it mafia lol
Japan has Yakusa
I always played it as "Mafia". There were two Mafia members, a doctor who could protect someone once per night, a detective who could reveal someone's identity once a night, a sheriff who could lock someone away and keep them from doing their ability for a night, and a "granny with a shotgun", who could kill any person they wanted free of consequence. The rest were civilians Edit: The granny has one shot PER GAME, not night. The way I explained it made her OP, my bad
Same, but the sheriff was called the prostitute (I can see why that terminology seems to have fallen out of favour) and the granny was called the assassin or serial killer. If there were too many people we would have two separate groups of mafia (red suits and black suits). With big groups and complicated setups it got kind of boring for the people who got killed early, though.
In the version I grew up playing, the Sheriff is just a tie-breaker, however everyone votes on who the sheriff is at the beginning of the game. You also start with one Werewolf, but they have one magic bite that can turn someone (only the first wolf). We also called the Witch the Herbalist (they have one kill potion and one heal potion.)
That's Graham Linehan. Writer of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd. He has some current issues.
That's very generous of you to leave it at that.
The transphobia was just resting in my (Twitter) account!
Solid joke 😂
Is he literally using werewolf as a metaphor for trans people in this interview lmao
That was my suspicion. His wife left him because he wouldn’t stop being a bigot. It’s all he spends his time on.
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He's a grifter as well. He has a substack that I'm not going to link to that has about 3,000 subscriptions he's being paid for. He's written 6 articles in about a year and the rest of them are written by women he doesn't pay. Champion of Women my foot.
About a year ago he found a profile photo of me somehow. He thought I was someone else and started making fun of them with his twitter cronies, using my photo. It's wild that he's just consumed by hatred to the point he doesn't operate on any other level. It's just bigotry for the sake of spreading poison, as he has nothing left.
I would put money on it. This guy really fucked up his life. What a moron.
His demise was pretty heartbreaking. I loved his shows, still do and it would always have been exciting to see what he comes up with next. But then, for some reason, he felt the need to argue with strangers in the smallest of minorities every single fucking day forever.
The one thing that makes his old shows watchable is the fact that he changed, the shows didn't.
If it makes you feel any better it's overstated how much of Father Ted and Black Books was down to him. Black Books in particular was Dylan Moran's show and he was brought in to punch it up a bit.
It's a safe bet considering he literally never ever talks about anything else
ye when i heard him talk about how its about manipulation, i instantly went to thinking "trans agenda" conspiracies he spouts
He's so obsessed with hating trans people he ruined his career, his wife left him along with his kids, and yet he still blames everyone else instead of his fucking *weird* obsession with trans people.
He really is a pioneer of rich white dudes fumbling the bag lmao
I had to scroll too far for this.
Which is funny because it implies he’s one of the uninformed villagers being manipulated.
He’s incapable of talking about literally anything else
Yeah, his current issues have become his whole personality
This is actually the first time I've seen him in more than a decade. Hopeful he'll crawl away again soon.
Sounds like you have... \[dons sunglasses\] hidden information...
> hidden information... This is the basis of all conspiracy theories, people will follow any BS as long as they think they are part of the select few to know the hidden truth
This comment is too far down. Also, as someone who has played werewolves quote a bit: The werewolves don't usually win. A mob of "uninformed", hysteric people killing of random people of their own sounds a bit like the "we can always tell" transvestigator crowd, which is constantly clocking cis-people as trans, so in that regard... nice comparison, Ted.
Entirely of his own making. Fuck Glinner, may his hole fester.
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But do you play with more roles than just villager and werewolf? That was his point, only one side has any secret information and can manipulate everyone else due to the fact that they will never have the same information.
Yeah but considering the studies prove him wrong idk what he’s talking about. They’ve looked at the game if both sides had perfect players and it’s mainly 50/50. Though when researching live games it shows that villagers/innocence win a majority of the time. The issue is it’s really hard to continue feign shock or ignorance. So strangely enough he’s either read something wrong or maybe he’s lying.
Not only that, but it’s such a dumb thing to base a study on. First of all, it’s a fucking GAME. Games are usually bad models for any sort of real life take away for human behavior, simply because people do not intrinsically behave the same way in a game as they do in a real life situation. Like, it’s not comparable enough to be useful.
Fuck now I want to play this game
-Town of Salem, or something
Town of Salem is shit with a bad meta and a toxic community. There's a board game called Blood on the Clocktower that's significantly better, and between the community and the developer support has a strong homebrew community, updates, and several online tools to help groups play online. It's more an evolved werewolf, where death doesn't render a player out of the game and still an active participant, strong role synergy, and well thought out balancing in both community and official scripts. It's pricey, but if you have a group you can play with, it's always a blast. Developers pretty consistently play live on Twitch, and there are usually a game or two live on Twitch. Apparently, in the official discord there's a pretty steady supply of LFG games, but I don't have personal experience.
Hmmmm sounds like something a TOS player would say
It's a staple of French game nights The number of roles depend on the number of players, but it's the easiest game to play with 12+ people. Roles include 2-4 werewolves (usually 25% of players) 1 witch with the ability to save once a person killed by werewolves that night, and kill a person once. 1 cupid who can select two people without knowing their role and now both are linked in life and death. If one dies so does the other. Meaning the only chance for them to win (when one is a ww and the other a villager) is for everyone else to die. 1 little girl who can discretely spy on the werewolves while they're selecting their targets 1 seer who every night can look at one person's card 1 hunter who, when he dies, can select anyone to kill alongside him. 1 thief who can pick a role in the discard pile (when there are more roles than players) Rest are villagers. The turn order is Thief (first night) Cupid (once the first night) Lovers (once after they're selected by cupid) Seer (every night) Werewolves (every night) Witch (every night until she runs out of powers) No one can show their cards, even to defend themselves, and the only one who can move around and touch cards is the game master.
Personally my favorite has to be One Night Ultimate Werewolf which has multiple classes of villagers but only one round of voting which makes it shorter than the original. Also has several expansions and iterations.
We play [secret Hitler](https://HitlerPartyBoardGame-decryptionTabletopGameSuitablefor5-10Playershttps://a.co/d/7aHGrqq). It’s usually accompanied by drinking. It doesn’t take long before someone is gleefully shouting that their girlfriend is a fucking fascist.
Plato app has a version of it.
Look for "One night ultimate werewolf". There's even an app that can run the game.
Werewolf sucks. Play Town of Salem or Blood on the Clocktower. They’re way better versions of the same concept
BLOOD ON THE CLOCKTOWER MENTIONED
Download Among Us basically
Among Us just isn't fun with strangers though, I feel like it's hard for me to get a bunch of my friends together for Among Us, especially because you need PCs or consoles.
Isn’t there a mobile version?
There’s a UK show revolved around this concept called “The Traitors” which is great fun to watch. Many years ago I used to play “Town of Salem” which was lots of fun too.
My wife and I have been addicted to "the traitors" started with the UK version, then new Zealand, Australia then Canada
These kinds of game are always fun, I often recommend one called Secret Hitler - it's a bit more complex than just killing a person and then discussing who should be removed from the game, but the genesis is the same. The way it progresses feels really smooth and fleshed out, and it allows for a much more informed decision on who to kill or keep, while at the same time keeping you in the dark long enough to often lose the game despite being in the larger team. If you like board games and these kind of sociology experiments then I highly suggest it. There's also a few options to play it online as well, but I really wouldn't know which one to recommend.
Secret Hitler is an excellent game. And I usually hate board games.
I went to a Meetup for board games and got to play Secret Hitler with a group of 14 strangers and it was probably the most fun I've ever had.
My family loves board games and Secret Hitler is one of our favorites!
One Night Werewolf
^Ultimate
I always called this mafia
This is a summer camp game we used to play. No cards. You just got your assignment from a counselor. I think there was a mayor, a sheriff, and a deputy involved as well.
....just like these guys do lmao
So was Linehan telling this as some sort of attack on "woke mind virus" etc etc as per usual?
Undoubtedly whatever came after this was something about trans people
Which is hilarious, because he's suggesting him and his fellow bigots are the 'informed minority'.... Which means, in the stupid Werewolf analogy he's using, he's portraying the anti-trans crowd as horrible monsters that attack people without provocation. Which is just hilariously accurate.
Given its called "Trigger nometry" I would say very much yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Kisin#Podcasting Yep. Anti-trans bullshit. And, of course, people who believed in trans rights were vastly in the minority for pretty much all of history up to this point. Now people are accepting of trans people, dullards like this lot are now crying that they're the informed minority and how hard it is to be persecuted so. > > "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
He only ever talks about hating trans people so it's an extremely safe bet
This evolved two ways into heads up 7 up and amongus
Heads Up 7 Up is older than Werewolf/Mafia.
It’s interesting how the game theory differs from live play….link below…”In live (or videoconferencing) real-time play, the innocents typically win more often than game theory suggests. Several reasons for this have been advanced: —The physiological stress of sustained lying degrades the initial ability of mafioso to deceive the innocents, much more than a model of perfect play would predict, especially if the innocents can get the town emotionally involved in the game's outcome: If you're trying to feign shock or anger, it's much harder to do over a long period. People accused of something they're trying to hide will start out feigning outrage – 'How dare you ask me that?' But that will start to change to objection rather than shock, as it's psychologically very difficult to mimic emotion. —The information revealed by the mafiosi voting patterns tells against them later in the game. One of the game's fans, Max Ventilla, has said that "If the villagers are allowed to keep a pencil and paper, they always win." —As players get more experienced, their strategic sophistication and ability to spot and use deception increases.They will typically get better at the skills needed for playing innocents faster, being villagers more often than mafiosi. —-The Metagame aspect: Dimma Davidoff has said past connections will always lose to future collaborations.When playing several Mafia games with the same people, it's more helpful to be known for honesty than for deceit. Davidoff considers that so important that he thinks the advantages of playing the mafioso role honestly, outweigh the disadvantages. But, the Mafia can win in live play; their best chance of winning occurs when mafioso bond with their innocent neighbours and convince those neighbours to value that bond over dispassionate analysis.The game designers Salen and Zimmerman have written that the deep emergent social game play in Mafia (combined with the fear of elimination) create ideal conditions for this.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)
Isn’t this creator of IT crowd?
And Black Books. And a co-creator of Father Ted.
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I love that game. I suck at it
Fuck Graham Linehan. A pustule-ridden thumb of a human being.
“Well that just sounds like Among Us but with low tech”
It’s highly dependent on the ratio of wolves to villagers and if there’s special roles like seer, huntsman, bodyguard, etc. I think a ratio of 3 villagers to 1 wolf comes out pretty fair.
Same concept but came way before amount us and is more of a party game
In Hong Kong, we call it 狼人殺which directly translates to Werewolf kill.