Designer(s) Ted Alspach Players 5 to 75 | Publisher(s) Bézier Games, Inc. Age range 9 & up | |
Skill(s) required Bluffing, Partnership, Social skills, Roleplay, Negotiation, Deduction | ||
Ultimate Werewolf is a party card game designed by Ted Alspach and published by Bézier Games. It is based on the social game, Werewolf, which is Andrew Plotkin's reinvention of Dimitry Davidoff's 1987 party game, Mafia. The Werewolf game appeared in many forms before Bézier Games published Ultimate Werewolf in 2008.
Contents
Gameplay
Ultimate Werewolf can be played with 5 to 75 players of all ages. Each player has an agenda: as a villager, hunt down the werewolves and vampires; as a werewolf or vampire, convince the other villagers that you are innocent, while secretly attacking those same villagers each night. Dozens of special roles are available to help both the villagers and the werewolves achieve their goals. The game has more than forty unique roles, eighteen different scenarios, a set of 78 fully illustrated cards, a moderator score pad to keep track of games, and a comprehensive game guide.
Roles
The many roles of Ultimate Werewolf include:
The numbers in parentheses after each card name are for balancing purposes, with positive cards tending to help the villagers and negative cards aiding the werewolves. A mix of cards which sum to zero make for a balanced game.
Expansion packs
Awards
One Night Ultimate Werewolf
One Night Ultimate Werewolf, published by Bézier Games, shares many similarities with Ultimate Werewolf. The most notable difference between the two is that in One Night Ultimate Werewolf gameplay develops over a single 'night', with only one round of plot development, voting and elimination. As such, games are typically time limited to a small number of minutes with players opting to play successive, unrelated games. This approach makes individual games shorter, does not exclude players who are eliminated early in the game (as in Ultimate Werewolf) and often prompts faster paced games. On the other hand the shorter games lose the opportunity to develop extended logical reasoning over the longer games of Ultimate Werewolf.
One Night Ultimate Werewolf also provides a smartphone app taking the role of the moderator, available on both iOS and Android platforms. The primary role of the app is to read out the moderator script, relieving the need for one of the players to take this impartial role, as required in Ultimate Werewolf.
Editions
Like Werewolf, a number of extension packs exist for One Night Ultimate Werewolf. One Night Ultimate Daybreak, One Night Ultimate Vampire and two bonus packs comprise additional character roles that can be used instead of or in combination with the roles from One Night Ultimate Werewolf. The One Night smartphone app enables players to include roles from any edition in a single game and adjusts the moderator script accordingly.
Bézier games has announced release of One Night Ultimate Alien, their next edition in the One Night Ultimate series, estimated for release in June 2017.