Will You Survive the Night? A Review of One Night Ultimate Werewolf

One Night Ultimate Werewolf takes the classic social deduction party game that can last for hours and synthesizes it into a quick ten minute experience.

With twelve roles and limited time, will the wolves be hunted or the village destroyed?

Gameplay

There are a total of twelve roles in the game. You can choose which ones to include each game but at least one werewolf card is required. To begin the game, shuffle one role card for each player together with three extra cards, then deal each player a card facedown. The remaining three are placed in the center of the table. Each player peeks at their own role card.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf includes a night phase and a day phase, after which the game ends. During the night phase, all players close their eyes. You can either use the game’s app to announce the actions of the night phase, or have a player announce them with the scripts provided in the rules. Some roles wake up during the night and perform an action — for instance, werewolves look at each other to confirm their identity. The seer role wakes up and can either look at one other player’s role or can look at two of the three role cards in the center of the table. The troublemaker can switch any two cards of other players, while the drunk switches his card with one of the cards in the center.

After each role currently in the game wakes up and takes their actions one at a time, the night phase ends and the day beings. During the day phase, players can exchange information and try to piece together what they believe happened during the night and who has which roles. If you started the game with one role and ended up being switched during the course of the night, your new role determines your current team.

There are two teams in the game, the werewolves and the rest of the village. The day phase only lasts a few minutes, and at the end players have to vote on who will die. If a werewolf dies, the village wins, if a villager dies then the werewolves win. If both werewolf roles end up in the center of the table and no player is the werewolf, everyone wins if no one is killed (a player cannot be killed unless she receives more than one vote).

Review

Werewolf is a classic social deception and party game but games can often run long (if you’re eliminated early, you’ll be standing around with nothing much to do for some time) and players often have little actual information to go off of, especially at the start. One Night Ultimate Werewolf fixes both of these issues, and removes player elimination entirely from the game.

Played in ten minutes, the game plays so briskly and so satisfyingly, that you’ll soon be playing multiple rounds, which means everyone will be playing multiple roles over the course of the night. If you’re a werewolf in one game, you may be a mason in the next. The roles that are included can also change between games, so there are always new combinations to try out and new dynamics to play off of each other to keep things from becoming stale.

As players talk during the day and you try to piece together what happened during the night, information comes to light that may be useful in your decision. If your group mostly stays silent than you’re more or less playing a guessing game, but if both teams start communicating, throwing out information and misinformation, that’s when the game really shines.

It’s a nice feature to the game that you don’t have to play with the app, but the app is a great addition. It makes it easy to select which roles you’re playing with, times the day nicely, and keeps everything more organized.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf is one of the best social deduction games out there for fans of casual games. It plays so smoothly and so quickly, and will definitely have you coming back for more.

Pros: Multiple rounds can be played in an evening allowing players to take on multiple roles, great companion app, short playtime, no elimination

Cons: Doesn’t play as well with quiet players

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.