Troubleseeker

Werewolves in Charlotte

I recently attended an amazing conference, the RubyConf 2007 (held in Charlotte this year). The conference was held in the very quiet town Charlotte. The city’s downtown appeared so dead (where were all the pedestrians?), that it would have made a wonderful setting for a zombie movie a la 28 days later. So while we were running around aimlessly in the hopes of finding a place where you could buy a lawnmower (thank you Peter Jackson!), we had to come realizing that preparing against zombies wouldn’t help very much. We were facing a much greater evil (no, not dinosaur-riding Germans): Werewolves! Lots of them. Very very many. Most of the conference attendees actually (did THEY all eat the zombies?).

Werewolf, also known as Mafia is a game about cunning and accusing but mainly about surviving. The only thing you need is a deck of cards. The 6-16 players are divided randomly into two groups: villagers and werewolves. A narrator is supervising the game and informs the players when the night or day begins. At night, the werewolves get to kill one villager. During the day, everyone (including the werewolves disguised as villagers) is discussing and eventually voting on who to lynch merely based on suspicions. If the villagers happen to lynch a werewolf then they are one step closer to victory and prove the Spanish Inquisition right. If they manage to kill all the werewolves they win. The werewolves win if at one point there are as many villagers as there are werewolves.

The rules are really simple. The game is stressful but fun. Even if you end up playing a villager, you still need to convince all the others of your innocence. You can compare it to going through customs in certain countries: you do not smuggle anything, you do not intend to commit any crimes, you don’t have anything to hide – and yet, after the tenth question that points to a specific item on your 5th birthday while you’re spending the family’s vacation in Cuba you start to get wobbly knees.