Game Like a Mother

Quick Take: There are many different roles to play in this quick, social game as your group tries to determine who the werewolves are hiding in your midst. This game is best played with larger groups (6 people or more) and with people who don't mind incorporating a bit of deception in their discussion of who might be the werewolf. While the game is simple to play there's a bit of strategy and finesse to playing the game well, which is why I gave the game a medium complexity rating. 

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How to Play: Every player is dealt a card that gives them a role and they must look at the card and keep this role a secret. I highly recommend downloading the free app to run the game, it basically does everything for you and makes things very simple. You turn on the app and it becomes night, everyone must close their eyes and some of the roles are called upon to do various actions. For example, a person with a a werewolf card would wake up at night and see who else is a werewolf or look at one of the center cards. The seer may look at another person's card or look at two of the center cards, the troublemaker can switch the cards of two other players without looking at either of them, etc. There are a total of 12 different roles so there is a lot of variety available for game play. In the morning everyone gets to wake up, open their eyes, and try to either kill a werewolf if they are on the villager team or try to lie and deceive and get the villagers to kill one of their own if they are on the werewolf team. The trick is, your role may have changed in the night and you have no idea! A villager could have turned into a werewolf, a werewolf could have turned into a troublemaker, and there may be just a few players who know the truth about what has happened over the course of the night. Every game can be different and you can test your strategic skills in how you choose to talk to others about your nighttime role - do you tell the truth or do you deceive? How can you tell if someone is telling you the truth or not?

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Variations: There are so many options with the characters you can include in the game. The minion and tanner are some of our favorite characters to include in play since the minion is on the werewolf team and the tanner just wants to die (!!) and as a result is trying to get people to call them the werewolf so they're out of the game. And happily, the game provides a timer for discussion so you are limited to 5 minutes max figuring out who you want to vote out as the werewolf and you can't get bogged down in nitty gritty negotiations.

Similar Games To Check Out: Codenames, Werewords, Monster My Neighbor, 5 Minute Dungeon