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New Tools for Werewolves, and More Roles for the Night

W. Eric Martin
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Designer Ted Alspach is debuting two expansions for his Ultimate Werewolf: Ultimate Edition at Spiel 2011 in October through his own Bézier Games.

First is Ultimate Werewolf Artifacts, which despite the name can be used with any version of Werewolf. Artifacts includes forty unique artifact cards, and each player receives one before the game begins. Some provide a useful special power turn after turn, others a one-shot effect, still others affect everyone else in the game.

Says Alspach, "One of the things that werewolf detractors (and by this I mean the players, not the villagers in the game) dislike about the game of Werewolf is that players have very little information to go on when determining who might be a werewolf, especially early on in the game. Artifacts directly addresses this issue."

"Another area that Artifacts addresses," continues Alspach, "is that if you're a plain vanilla villager, you sometimes feel a little left out. There's the seer being all clever helping the village, the werewolves plotting together to kill everyone, and a variety of special roles that are having an impact on the game. But as a plain villager, there's very little going on. And as you probably know, you pretty much have to have a bunch of plain vanilla villagers in each game of Ultimate Werewolf. Artifacts makes vanilla villagers into rich ice cream sundaes!" All the better for werewolves to eat them, I suppose...


Second is Ultimate Werewolf: Night Terrors, which is in the vein of Alspach's Ultimate Werewolf: Classic Movie Monsters from 2010 as it contains six new roles that can be added to UW. Alspach describes the roles as follows:

Quote:
First is the Insomniac. Here's a villager who just can't sleep at nighttime, try as he might. The good news is that in his hazy non-sleep time, he learns if one or both of his neighbors was up during the night doing something. He's not alert to know if it was indeed just one of them or both, and if only one of them which one it was, but he knows if someone was up and about during the night. Each night. It might be a werewolf out looking for prey. It might be the helpful Seer who is trying to find werewolves. Or it might be any other number of nighttime active roles in the game.

Much more alert at nighttime is the Beholder. She wakes up the first night and sees who the Seer is! What she ends up doing with that information is anyone's guess, but hopefully she'll figure out how to help the village and prevent the Seer from being lynched by the crazed mob.

And then there's everyone's favorite numerically-aware goth, The Count. He's got his spreadsheet open, and he's, well, counting all night. He knows how many werewolves are on each side of him in the village because he counted. "One Werewolf. Two, two scary hairy werewolves...ah ha ha ha. Three, three three evil lycanthropic werewolves...mwa ha ha ha."

Night terror? Or merely OCD?

Possibly the most mysterious creature of the night is the Thing (that goes "bump" in the night). This nasty, furry, slightly smelly creature is helping out the village by bumping people in the wee hours of night. What will those people do with the information garnered from the Thing? What is the Thing's ultimate purpose?

But not everyone is out to help people at nighttime. There's a new werewolf in town, though she's a little...sleepy. The Dreamwolf takes it easy, not bothering to wake up with the other werewolves unless one of her sister werewolves is killed. Then she's all about taking out her revenge on the village. Watch out!

Finally, the most feared night monster of all, the Bogeyman, rounds out the roles in ''Night Terrors''. Take too long at nighttime and the Bogeyman gets to kill someone. He kills indiscriminately, with a winning condition that totally fits his role.

Both Artifacts and Night Terrors will be available at Spiel 2011 with the expansions shipping in October 2011 for those not at the show. Preorders are possible at the Bézier Games website.
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17 Comments
Subscribe sub options Tue Jul 19, 2011 6:30 am
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Colorcrayons
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What you did there with the count? I see it.
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 8:07 am
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Imre Hauszknecht
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Is the Night Terror expansion playable with the compact edition too?
 
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 8:32 am
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Greg Wilson
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Okay, the Count made me chuckle.

Potentially a very powerful role for the village, though. Say there are three wolves. There's, what, a one-in-four chance that the wolves are all on his left or all on his right, meaning he can reveal early, clear half the players, and solve the game right out of the gate.

The chance of this happening goes down the more wolves there are, but even with higher numbers it seems quite likely that one side will only contain one or two wolves, allowing the Count to clear a large swathe of the remaining players.
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 9:23 am
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Jayson Stevens
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BlackSheep wrote:
Okay, the Count made me chuckle.

Potentially a very powerful role for the village, though. Say there are three wolves. There's, what, a one-in-four chance that the wolves are all on his left or all on his right, meaning he can reveal early, clear half the players, and solve the game right out of the gate.

The chance of this happening goes down the more wolves there are, but even with higher numbers it seems quite likely that one side will only contain one or two wolves, allowing the Count to clear a large swathe of the remaining players.


If they believe him. He's a prime target to die if he goes public.

He's more useful in determining if a daytime lynching was a wolf or not.
 
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 10:12 am
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Ted Alspach
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If you haven't played Ultimate Werewolf, you're missing out on the best version of werewolf ever!!!
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flyinghair wrote:
Is the Night Terror expansion playable with the compact edition too?


Ultimate Werewolf: Night Terrors is compatible with both Ultimate Werewolf: Compact Edition and Ultimate Werewolf: Ultimate Edition. And of course it works with the roles from the Ultimate Werewolf: Classic Movie Monsters expansion too.

Being a small publisher, you gotta think of everything.
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 10:56 am
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Ted Alspach
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Quote:
Night terror? Or merely OCD?


The little caption for The Count was Eric's, not mine. Very very clever, that W. Eric Martin...
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 10:59 am
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Imre Hauszknecht
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Thank you for the quick anwser! I hope, we meet in Essen
 
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 3:07 pm
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Sean Tompkins
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Very fun Ted. In your playtests so far, do you include a seer in addition to the count? How powerful has the count been?
 
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 4:51 pm
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Ted Alspach
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seanp wrote:
Very fun Ted. In your playtests so far, do you include a seer in addition to the count? How powerful has the count been?


The smaller the game, the greater an impact this has. I wouldn't use it in a game with less than three werewolves. It's also one of those great roles to throw in without telling anyone it is there (like the Idiot/Pacifict, Teenage Werewolf, Tanner, etc.). But to do that, you need to have most of the players be familiar enough with the role so that they're not totally confused as to why some guy is claiming that he KNOWS there are two werewolves to the left of him.
 
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 5:09 pm
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Greg Wilson
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palmerkun wrote:
If they believe him. He's a prime target to die if he goes public.


If the role is known to be in the game, there's no reason to disbelieve him unless two people claim the role. At which point you lynch between them, since one is evil.

If you're playing with role-reveal, as the Count I'd happily put myself up for lynch if my death would clear a bunch of people.

He wouldn't be a high-priority target for the wolves because once his one-off info is revealed he has no powers. He's a named villager who gets a very important piece of info right at the start of the game. Absolutely he should claim it as soon as possible.

I don't get why a good role dying after clearing half the village would be a bad thing, anyway. You still win if you're dead.

palmerkun wrote:
He's more useful in determining if a daytime lynching was a wolf or not.


He's told the numbers at the start, not each night.

I could see that being a nice alternate version of the Count for no-reveal games, though. Each night, he's just told the number of wolves remaining.
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 5:12 pm
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Tim
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More awesomeness in time for BGG.CON. Between this and Panic Station I might not have time to play any of the lesser games! whistle
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 5:55 pm
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Quote:
"One Werewolf. Two, two scary hairy werewolves...ah ha ha ha. Three, three three evil lycanthropic werewolves...mwa ha ha ha."

Ahahahahahaaaaaaa! *thunder and lightning, people make scared faces*
Yes, I love the Count.
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 6:35 pm
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Ken H.
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BlackSheep wrote:
He wouldn't be a high-priority target for the wolves because once his one-off info is revealed he has no powers. He's a named villager who gets a very important piece of info right at the start of the game. Absolutely he should claim it as soon as possible.


I agree -- I'm trying to think of a scenario that would warrant not claiming immediately on Day 1. The only downside I can think of is that it gives the wolves a slightly higher chance of finding the Seer, since they can rule out the Count as a possible suspect. That's fairly trivial, though, considering the potential power of the reveal.
 
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 6:59 pm
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Sterling Babcock
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Sweet! I am really looking forward to the expansions! They all look great!
 
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 8:55 pm
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BGGnews wrote:
Says Alspach, "One of the things that werewolf detractors (and by this I mean the players, not the villagers in the game) dislike about the game of Werewolf is that players have very little information to go on when determining who might be a werewolf, especially early on in the game. Artifacts directly addresses this issue."


Yeah... those are people I don't want or need to play WW with.

Don't get me wrong, different roles are all well and good but the game is in the reading of people. That's the game. Once you start giving information away people stop trying to read each other. Anyway, I'm sure this expansion will be welcomed by hordes of mob mentality villagers, and I'll certainly recommend it to less passionate players, but there's never going to be anything as sweet as identifying werewolves on D1 and D2 purely by visual and audio cues from the people playing the game.

Vox
 
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 10:27 pm
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Tobias Wehrum
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redsimon wrote:
Quote:
"One Werewolf. Two, two scary hairy werewolves...ah ha ha ha. Three, three three evil lycanthropic werewolves...mwa ha ha ha."

Ahahahahahaaaaaaa! *thunder and lightning, people make scared faces*
Yes, I love the Count.

Oh yes, That text was awesome, and so is The Count
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  • Posted Tue Jul 19, 2011 11:01 pm
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Nevin Steindam
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Rubric wrote:
BlackSheep wrote:
He wouldn't be a high-priority target for the wolves because once his one-off info is revealed he has no powers. He's a named villager who gets a very important piece of info right at the start of the game. Absolutely he should claim it as soon as possible.


I agree -- I'm trying to think of a scenario that would warrant not claiming immediately on Day 1. The only downside I can think of is that it gives the wolves a slightly higher chance of finding the Seer, since they can rule out the Count as a possible suspect. That's fairly trivial, though, considering the potential power of the reveal.


When I'm a werewolf, I often try to kill off the people that the village is least likely to choose to lynch. After all, I want to keep the pool of people who could be lynched as large as possible, so I don't stand out in it! True, once the Count has revealed himself, he becomes a normal villager, but he is a villager WHO ALL THE OTHER VILLAGERS KNOW IS NOT A WEREWOLF. It's worth taking him off the table for that.

In the end, though, I agree: The good that the Count can do by revealing right away makes up for the harm that will happen when the wolves eat him. If you're playing that dead people still win at the end, then that still seems like the right strategy.
 
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  • Posted Sat Jul 23, 2011 4:35 pm
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