LogFAQs > #935643231

14. Werewords

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Party game, social deduction, word game, clue-giving, real-time
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 5-10 minutes
Experience: 50-100+ plays over 15+ sessions with 5-9 players (2017-2020)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 17/100 (2018)

Summary - During the pre-game, each player is assigned either to be a Villager or Werewolf, with one Seer on the Villagers' team and one Mayor. The Mayor chooses a secret word from an app, and then the Seer and Werewolves independently see the word. The meat of the game lasts four minutes, timed by the app, during which each player (out of turn order) asks yes/no questions about the word to the Mayor. The Mayor answers with a finite supply of yes/no/maybe tokens. If the word is correctly guessed, the Villagers win unless the Werewolves (who reveal themselves) guess the Seer. If the word is not correctly guessed, the Werewolves win unless a plurality of all players identify a Werewolf.

Design - Werewords is really just Twenty Questions with window dressing. You have to like guessing games to like Werewords. It, like so many other games, just isn't that mechanically intricate.

But Werewords does go beyond pure laziness. It adds just enough to the formula to make it far more replayable and mechanically solid, starting with an app. I don't play a lot of games that involve the use of an app, but Werewords's app provides choices for words, which is fantastic, plus handles the night phase and the timer. The night phase is of course necessary because of Werewords's sole other innovation, adding roles to a guessing game. Having a Seer is a huge asset since you'll never be left with literally no one having any idea what the word is (which evens out really difficult/abstract situations), while the presence of Werewolves forces the Seer to be subtle in helping. Incentives are added very cleverly, because as the Werewolves are free to guess or mislead, it also becomes important for them to appear helpful, lest the word be guessed and they get isolated by the Villagers.

I love eurogames, but they were a learned taste. I have always loved games that are based off non-"game" skills - wordplay, trivia, art, storytelling, simple math, pattern recognitions, reading people, and the like. So many games based on those, however, don't provide a solid, game-y framework. Werewords's core mechanic is definitely a non-game skill (though obviously it can be improved with experience), and it integrates game-i-ness perfectly. Games can still go awry with words that are too easy or too hard, though arguably those are some of the funniest experiences, and the games are short enough not to agonize over. Slightly worse is when the Mayor doesn't know any of the words on offer by the app - in these cases, it's a simple matter of resetting the game... which takes a perhaps just a minute, but which can feel a bit cumbersome if it happens more than once per session.

Experience - My friends got Werewords at Gen Con 2017, and while I didn't get to play it with them then, we spent four or five straight hours playing twenty questions with Werewords words on the drive back. The game itself has become perhaps the greatest staple of the last two or three years in my groups when we exceed five or six people. Due to its length, Werewords can be played 5-10 times in a single sitting to allow everyone at the table to be Mayor once. It's cooled off lately, but mainly because I haven't been in as many situations that allow that player count.

On the note of twenty questions, it also became a game gaming pal #1 and I played non-stop for months when we first met. It wasn't Werewords, but we did use the app for inspiration more than once on the word.
Future - Last weekend I rotated in some lower-ranked game for the hell of it, but Werewords is still the most recent king of the larger-player-count party game on this list. Its usage will directly depend on the frequency of larger groups in the future.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness