User:Mark Otaris/Guide

Werewolf is an IRC party game in which each player gets a role and all players are divided in two teams: one team of villagers and village-aligned special roles who want to survive, and one team of wolves and other wolf-aligned special roles who want to kill all of the villagers. Many game modes also have neutral roles at higher player counts.

This guide is intended for new players who want to learn how to play Werewolf. It explains what a standard game looks like in the ##werewolf channel on freenode.

Starting a game
All games of Werewolf must have at least four players. You can join a game with !join. There are many game modes which change what roles are available, but some roles are common to most game modes. Players who have joined a game can vote for a game mode with !game and the game mode will be selected if enough players have voted for it; otherwise, the IRC bot, lykos, will pick a game mode randomly.

You can vote to start the game with the !start command. When a game starts, each player will be given a role by the IRC bot. The bot will give you a short description of your role, but you can always get the full description for any role with !wiki role.

Night
The game starts at night and the night ends after two minutes or once all night roles have performed their action.

If you have a wolf-aligned role, you want to eliminate the players with village team roles until the wolves outnumber them and win. All wolf-aligned roles except the cultist and minion have access to the wolfchat, which allows them to talk to one another both at day and at night by sending messages to lykos. Players with wolfchat roles use the wolfchat to coordinate kills and behave strategically in the main channel. On each night, including the first, the wolves will pick a target to kill which will be announced at the start of the day. The targeted player could be any villager, but the chance of winning is increased for the wolves if they determine which players have special roles that are more valuable for the village team; determining which players have these roles is done by observing what players say at night, and, for the following nights, at day.

If you are the seer, oracle or augur, you have access every night to privileged information about the role of a player. Because you might die on the first night, you want not only to obtain this information but also to relay it to other players. If you are the last player with a night role to perform an action, the night will end immediately and you will not have time to relay this privileged information to the main channel, so you want to act fast. Usually, on the first night, the seer will see someone as fast as possible and relay what they saw in an abbreviated form; for example, a seer who saw that the player mark-otaris is a villager could send the hint "mav" to the main channel.

If you are a villager, you have no special ability, but that does not mean you cannot participate actively in the game. In fact, you will always have something to do on the first night: indeed, it is guaranteed, in most cases, that the seer will send a hint to the main channel on the first night. If nobody else sent hints, the wolves could easily determine who the seer is by waiting for someone to send the hint and could target that person, and the village team would lose the ability to get the privileged information the seer has access to on the following nights! Your task, thus, is to send a fake hint to the channel so that it looks as if you were the seer. If many villagers do this, the wolves will be confused and will not know whom to target, increasing the chances of winning for all village-aligned players.

In many game modes, there will be a harlot if there are more than eight players. The harlot visits a player every night, dies if that player is targeted by the wolves or if that player is a wolf, but cannot be targeted directly. For this reason, the harlot will often be the best role to claim in the channel once the night is over. Furthermore, the harlot should usually hint the player who is going to be visited before the night ends. This way, if the visited player is a wolf, once the night ends everyone will know to lynch that wolf. Care must be taken by the harlot to either make this hint look like a seer hint or to send the hint late enough that the wolves will already have picked a target to kill when the harlot visits, so that the visited player will not be targeted, leading to the death of both this player and the harlot.

Day
Once all players with night roles have performed required actions, or after two minutes, the night ends. The IRC bot then announces the roles of the players who were killed and the names of those who were given totems by the shamans. If the traitor or a lycan has turned into a wolf, this is also announced.

Lynching
Once the night is over, the villagers are required to vote on someone to lynch. The general strategy on the village side goes like this. Usually, one of the players with a special role that only exists once in the game, called safes, will claim publicly this role in the channel. Since only one player has this role, the player can be trusted to not be a wolf trying to mislead the channel as long as no player makes a counter claim. There is no need for other players with unique special roles to claim in the channel; instead, the other safes can send a private message to the lead safe who publicly claimed. The safes can then exchange information privately and decide on a person to lynch. Once they have decided, the lead safe will announce the person to be lynched in the channel and the villagers will follow the lead safe's vote.

The !votes command can be used to determine how many votes are required to lynch and the day will end either after twelve minutes, or once someone has been lynched.

In small games with only one wolf, the wolf will sometimes claim a safe role and attempt to mislead the villagers into voting for the real safe. When done properly, these claims can be more credible than the claim of the real safe and this can lead the wolf team to a win in an otherwise difficult situation: for example, on a day with one seer, one villager, and one wolf, the wolf is likely to be lynched if no fake claim is made. In larger games where there have not been safe claims, or where the claims have been ambiguous, the wolves might sometimes agree during the day to lynch one innocent player and attempt to make other inattentive players follow them. This is called a wolfwagon. The wolves do not have a majority, but if they can get at least two villagers to follow their vote, the innocent player will be lynched and the wolves will get one more night to kill someone, in addition to having gotten a safe or a villager lynched. Both of these strategies have risks and are best used only when the wolf team is not already likely to win through other means. Villagers, of course, should be aware of these deceitful tricks and pay attention to the game.

Abstaining
Players can also vote to abstain with the !nolynch command. It is impossible to abstain from lynching on the first day, but a majority is not necessary for abstaining: half of the players is enough to abstain, while half plus one is necessary to lynch someone. There are a few cases where it is preferable to abstain from lynching. If there are three villagers and one wolf, for example, the villagers should abstain instead of lynching someone. The wolf will kill someone at night, then there will be two villagers and one wolf left. This increases the chance that a player picked randomly to be lynched will be the wolf. Another case where players should abstain is when there are two villagers and two wolf team members only one of which is a wolf. In this case, the wolf team members can vote to abstain since abstaining requires only half of the votes. The wolf can kill one of the villagers; then the two wolf team members can vote to lynch the remaining villager and win.

Determining who is a safe
In most cases, safes are players with special unique village-aligned roles. A player with the gunner template can also in some cases be considered a safe. If there is a matchmaker, a player with a unique special role chosen as one of the lovers by the matchmaker cannot necessarily be considered safe, because the other lover might be a wolf.

A villager known to be completely safe is called a full-safe. This happens when a villager is identified by the detective, because the detective sees the true role with complete accuracy. It also happens if a villager is visited by the harlot after the traitor has turned into a wolf, as long as there are no other hidden wolf-aligned roles: the player is guaranteed not to be a wolf because the harlot would have died otherwise when visiting.