Friendship is Rare, Do You Know What I'm Saying To You?

Anghold, Yvonne and I played poker tonight after a session of swimming. They told me that bluffing wasn’t my forte but I will retort with the following statement – I could do that but I don’t want to.

Now here are the rules for Are You A Werewolf? There are many different variants. The one I played had no seers but had a couple of ‘hunters.’

Materials: Use plain playing cards. You’ll need two cards that say “Werewolf” (Aces) plus one that says “Seer” (Jack) and up to twelve that say “Villager” (numbered cards)

Instructions: Assemble a village of 8-15 people. Most players will be ordinary villagers, but two will secretly be hungry werewolves. A third player will also be a mystic seer who learns secrets during the night. Lastly, a moderator is needed.

Setup: Shuffle together both werewolf cards, the seer card, and enough villager cards so that there is one card for everybody. If no one takes the moderator card voluntarily, shuffle it in as well (Joker). Deal a card to each player, face down. Everyone secretly looks at their card, and may not reveal it until they are killed.

Night: During the night, the werewolves will kill someone, and the Seer will learn the truth about one player. The moderator must lead the villagers through the events of the night. It happens this way: everyone closes their eyes. The moderator tells the werewolves to open their eyes. The werewolves see eachother and decide who to eat (by pointing to one of the others). Then the werewolves close their eyes and in some way the seer or the hunter finds out the nature of just one of the villagers (I forget how this works exactly).

Day: The moderator says morning has come and everyone opens their eyes. He announces who doesn’t wake up because he’s been killed. Then the villagers all have to decide who they think is a werewolf and their villager of choice is lynched. Once a majority agrees to lynch someone, the lynched player shows his or her card and says nothing for the rest of the game.

Game Over: Repeat night and day until the werewolves are dead, or the number of werewolves and villagers is equal, in which case the werewolves overrun the villagers, killing them off openly. All players still alive at the end of the game are the winners.

So sometimes, the two werewolves will be lynched and the villagers will win. Rarer, I believe, is that one or both of the werewolves survive mob justice and they win. The werewolves are also villagers of course, so they get a say in who gets lynched, but they don’t want to say anything that would make them suspect! It’s a delicate game of bluff and bait.

Anyway, my point is that the second and last time I played the game (at Theo’s) I was a werewolf and the only surviving player of the game. I bluffed ’em all out!

Marlo cut my hair last night and we watched Ocean’s Eleven (the remake). Yvonne and I went out for a walk in the afternoon and watched the game of cricket that happens out in uh…Douglas? Park every Sunday. We couldn’t figure out the rules just by watching, but we came to the conclusion that the players were all Indian/South Asian. We longed for a frisbee.