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Manchester Werewolf Chapter is back for 2012 and were teamed up with the guys at Larkin About again.
On Wednesday January 25th, the Manchester Werewolf Chapter and Larkin’ About will be running the first Werewolf game of 2012 at Barcelona Bar in the Northern Quarter. For FREE!
Werewolf is a simple game of strategy and deception, played by a large group of people.
The game is all about making accusations, lying, bluffing, second-guessing, and social engineering.
All are welcome! We have a great location with a bar because we all know deception is thirsty work. The event is suitable for all levels of experience from absolute newbie to Werewolf expert.
To register your interest, please visit our Facebook event page, or send us an email to larkin.about2009@gmail.com.
Wednesday we had a very successful night of werewolf…
I didn’t have my DSLR with me, so I only captured a few low rez photos of the action. Almost everything just worked…
Working with Larkin About (remember that ARG) was a great success and I’m sure the reason we got different players is simply because they were involved. The Location was great because the bar owner really wanted to help make it a successful event. He (Mike) even said next time he will happily do service to the circle, so people don’t even have to leave the game to get drinks. Its also staged happy hour when we’re playing, so cocktails start off at 2 for £5 and rise to 2 for £9 a few hours later. And to be honest the cocktails are actually not bad at all. I was drinking Cosmopolitans (as I do) and they were actually much better than average. Not quite the quality of NoHo, Scho Rehab or Aphotica but not far off.
Barcelona bar is a great venue with the slightly raised platform where we were playing werewolf and the space around it for people who were dead (as such) or just people not playing… The raised platform isn’t exactly round but its good enough to fit a good number of people looking at each other.
Playing the Thing to start the proceeding was a inspired thought, because it meant as people joined us, they could also just join the next round. In the end we played the thing then 2 different games of werewolf.
Everyone really enjoyed themselves and we played till bar closing time…
Only two slight negatives
- Not having food and consuming a ton of lovely cocktails (yes someone had to do it). Barcelona bar is due to start doing pancakes, and I had thought they were doing them already. So assuming I would be able to grab a sandwich somewhere I thought a savoury pancakes might work. Next time I’m sure they will be up and running in this area
- A lot of the regular players from MadLab, BarCamps, etc… didn’t turn up, which was a shame. However we did have a ton of new people and we even roped a couple in for a small drink, into the game actual game.
Anyway we’ve decided to do Werewolf on a bi-monthly schedule. So look out for details of the next game in January 2012… Thanks to everyone who turned up, and remember I am never the werewolf…
Manchester Werewolf Chapter is back after a long delay and this time we’ve teamed up with the guys at Larkin About. Larkin about are the Manchester equivalent of Hide & Seek. They do social experimental games in and around Manchester. So its a perfect match. If this goes well, there will be many more…
On Wednesdays November 23rd, the Manchester Werewolf Chapter and Larkin’ About will be running a game of Werewolf at Barcelona Bar in the Northern Quarter. It’s totally FREE!
Werewolf is a simple game of strategy and deception, played by a large group of people.
The game is all about making accusations, lying, bluffing, second-guessing, and social engineering.
All are welcome! We have a great location with a bar because we all know deception is thirsty work. The event is suitable for all levels of experience from absolute newbie to Werewolf pro. We hope to continue to host games of Werewolf as a regular event from this date onwards.
To register your interest, please visit our Facebook event page, or send us an email to larkin.about2009@gmail.com.
One of the sessions at BarCampBlackpool was the idea of playing werewolf, mafia or even the thing (which I will get into in a second) online. There’s been many attempts at this including the commercial ones. But every once in a while theres an attempt by someone to setup an open online version.
Werewolfapphb is one such example. Now to be honest I only walked in half way through the talk but from what I can see it was a lot like the IRC style werewolf games I’ve seen in the past. Seems perfectly fine but I started suggesting a whole bunch of things including status about players and leaderboards. All suggestions seemed to go down well.
I did also point out that there’s a trend towards playing werewolf using Google Plus Hangouts, which to be honest is a lot neater than doing it on IRC or even a Jabber/XMPP conference room.
I was introduced to a new style Werewolf game which seems to work well with a smaller number of people. Its called the Thing and has the advantage of people being involved through-out the whole game.
People also noted there was now a Leeds & Preston Werewolf Chapter which begs the question, what happened to the Manchester Chapter? Well fear not, it will be back and I’ve got ideas and scenarios… Watch this space…
Been looking forward to doing this for a long time. Imagine playing werewolf but instead of playing it in the well lit area of a bar. Imagine playing it out doors within a circle of small candles which flicker in the slow moving wind. Well dream no more, its going to happen on 15th May as one of the FutureEverything events at the Contact Theatre. Spaces are limited to 35 maximum so if you are interested please add yourself to the Werewolf group and signup for the attached event.
I say no. I think there’s too many things which can go wrong in a game especially when money in involved.
Victoria Coren seems to disagree but considers that social rules should be considered up front.
First, you have to decide whether you and your friend are happy to play fully against each other: trap-checking, check-raising, punchy value bets, the lot. If so, don’t be surprised if your friendship turns a little tense for a while. But there is no need to tell everyone your life story. Plenty of casino cohorts know each other and, if you’re playing straight, there’s nothing to announce.
If you are not prepared to treat your friend as any other opponent, you shouldn’t play on the same table. I am still stuck in an ancient tradition with my old mucker The Sweep: if we are heads-up in a casino pot, we check it down. That kind of thing must be announced, but should be avoided. Luckily, The Sweep is a total rock. If he so much as breathes on a pot, I fold everything but aces anyway.
Its getting a little like this when playing Werewolf with friends too.
(amazing what you can do with inkscape in a 30mins)
February 3, 2010 7 – 11pm : Manchester Werewolf Chapter at Pure Space, 11-13 New Wakefield Street, Manchester
We’re looking to play once a month, there’s no need to register or understand the rules just turn up and play along.
Be part of the game, beginners to pros its all good fun. Werewolf is a game that takes place in a small village which is haunted by werewolves. Each player is secretly assigned a role – Werewolf, Villager, or Seer (a special Villager). There is also a Moderator player who controls the flow of the game. The game alternates between night and day phases. At night, the Werewolves secretly choose a Villager to kill. Also, the Seer (if still alive) asks whether another player is a Werewolf or not. During the day, the Villager who was killed is revealed and is out of the game. The remaining Villagers then vote on the player they suspect is a Werewolf. That player reveals his/her role and is out of the game. Werewolves win when there are an equal number of Villagers and Werewolves. Villagers win when they have killed all Werewolves. Werewolf is a social game that requires no equipment to play, and can accommodate almost any large group of players.
Its that time to look for those shifty feet and false smiles, because Manchester’s Werewolf chapter is back in town (Facebook group).
February 3, 2010 7 – 11pm : Manchester Werewolf Chapter at Pure Space, 11-13 New Wakefield Street, Manchester
Be part of the game, beginners to pros its all good fun. Werewolf is a game that takes place in a small village which is haunted by werewolves. Each player is secretly assigned a role – Werewolf, Villager, or Seer (a special Villager). There is also a Moderator player who controls the flow of the game. The game alternates between night and day phases. At night, the Werewolves secretly choose a Villager to kill. Also, the Seer (if still alive) asks whether another player is a Werewolf or not. During the day, the Villager who was killed is revealed and is out of the game. The remaining Villagers then vote on the player they suspect is a Werewolf. That player reveals his/her role and is out of the game. Werewolves win when there are an equal number of Villagers and Werewolves. Villagers win when they have killed all Werewolves. Werewolf is a social game that requires no equipment to play, and can accommodate almost any large group of players. For more information about the game
I have playing with playing cards most of the night. Seems while I was sleeping that I came up with a card game which seems to be like werewolf/mafia but very different. I was reading up about game theory to see if it fit in one of the categories and it seems to fit into reciprocal altruism which is nicely exemplified with file sharing.
Another potential example would be the Internet file sharing communities. The ability to download (receive) a given file (an economic good) directly depends on other people who already possess the same file and share it through allowing uploading it to those who want it (a process which is also called seeding). Those who receive the file and later refuse to share it with others (through seeding) are known as leeches. However, there are methods to ban leechers, ie to deny them further participation in the file sharing network.
I don't want to come across like its totally tied down but the game seems pretty fun and could work with groups as big as 40 or as small as 12. Some other people have spoke to in the past have talked about the notion of a 3rd entity like the vampires. Well although we've not tried it out, I do worry it will just be chaos and there not enough to go on to make it worth doing. Plus vampires would be like a 2nd team of werewolves.
So forgetting vampires, my game is like werewolf as in there is a night and day phase but its more like a change of location with certain characters not being able to see or hear. The moderator/god/voice of the game is required to do a lot more in this game in regards to whos who. It may even require two or a piece of paper. The social notion of cheating and saying whatever you like is still there and is a major part of the game but now there's more emphases on altruism. You also don't need special cards for this game, a standard pack of 52 will scale up to 44 players I worked out. The suits, numbers and royality cards are very important for the game. And I did consider upping the numbers using the joker cards but it got very constrictive. Of course the game works well with drink too. The closes game I can find to the core idea of the game is this invented game called anandis.
I tried to do some probability calculations on who would win depending on how many of each character but it was beyond me. No what I really need is a Card game simulator. Maybe once I get a feel for the maths behind the game, I will write up a complete set of rules and release it to the world under a creative commons attribution licence or something.
BarCampLondon2 could not have gone much better. It was a great experience and dare It, better that the first one. Thanks to everyone who turned up and made it an unforgettable event. I've had a total of 3 hours sleep over the weekend, so my brain is crying out for bed. But who could know Werewolf could be so intense….
lots more to come… but in the meantime, I'm uploading video to blip.tv, pictures to flickr and my slides to slideshare. All using the BarCampLondon2 tag.
So my account of BarCampLondon2 should be pretty consistent with most others. It was a bloody good event. The venue supplied by BT was nothing short of amazing. We had the showcase arena which includes autoriumum fit for CEOs including 180+ investers. Thseat wewcomfortablele enough for me to actually sleep hours unlikeke the Yahoo offices last year, we only had a couple of so called rooms. Instead we spaces with either a 60 inch plasma screen or projectors with over 100 inch screens. Most of them seateabout 4040people, so with 3 spaces upstairs, one in the middle and 3 downstairs. There was more that enough room. But at the same time, it never felt like there was no one around. Talking of which 70+ people stayed over night, how do I know? Because I went around about 5am and counted. This is over double what we had last time and according to Chris Messina better that the last San Francisco BarCamp. Quite a few people didn't go to sleep over night, they opted to stay uthrough thehenight. In total we had about 170 people, but i did notice some new people during the day, so I would say we weren't that far off 200. I also think the people who really wanted to present did get a chance, also this time around no one had more that one session.
This time around we also had wireless connectivity, this time via BT Openzone passes. We (the organizers) were honestly worried about 24 hour passes. BT offered a lot of Openzone passes but each one cost its full price of 10 pounds. So obviously BT wanted to keep the costs down. Hence we didn't throw them out the crowd. We worried there wouldn't be enough for everyone during the whole of BarCamp. So come Sunday morning we would have a 100 people asking for new passes at the same time. We tried to setup ut itwasn't to be. In the end it all worked out and out worst fears didn't happen.
Talking about Organizers, Nat and Jason were a pleasure to work with. Some people might remember me asking for a co-organizer to work with a while ago. A lot of people were interested but in the end I choose Jason because he was super excited to be involved and lived pretty close. Nat although living in Oxford was also very excited and offered to do what she could remotely like print out signs, etc. Both of them were enthuastic and were willing to spend a lot of time on BarCampLondon2. I had maother offersersbut some were less excited and some had already done a BarCamp in another country. I really wanted to give new people a chance to get a feel for BarCamp and who knows might happen in the future. So big thanks to Nat and Jason once again, couldn't have done it without you guys.
So in more details behind the decisions of BarCampLondon2.
Eventwax, was recommended to me by Nat. I setup an account (wishes it had OpenID support) and liked what I saw. So I used it and gave the account details to Nat and Jason too. Our first problem came with the firsign upnup period of 1.5hrs. I allocated 100 tickets and they all went in 1.5 hours. Now that was fucking amazing but the message which you got when you then tried to sign up wasn't very useful. So much so, that our friends who don't speEnglishish as there first language didn't quite get the odd messageabout tickets and went ahead and booked their airplane/train tickets. So in that case I would send out a invite or clue them into went the next wave of tickets would be. Some could say thats unfair but its tricky if that person has already bought there tickets. I had a lot of complaints about the words tickets aattendeesees. I would love for the Eventwax guys to build in the ability to change the wording through out the site on a event by event bases. Tabilityity to also say this event is free and costs nothingwould be useful. I didn't try out the promo code stuff but that certainly looks useful for guest tickets in the future, would certainly beat sending out invites. The different levels of tickets was damm useful, because I could do the wave thing with tickets. So after the first 100, I started putting out tickets on the wiki and a few email lists. The same is true of the 3rd wave. Eventwax allows you decide in advance when tickets go live and stop. Date is great but time would also be very useful, as midnight isn'tvery useful for most people. Cancellation are a pain to deal with eventwax (although thank you to everyone who did email us), it would be great to have an aggregator ticket which looks how many spaces are actually left and offers them up as a ticket. On the last wave of tickets I had to keep cacluating the difference and changing the tickets for the last wave. That was a pain. Looking back I shouldn't have left the last wave of tickets till 2 days before the event but I really wanted to reuse all tcanceledledtickets. In the end we ended up with about 20% not used.
One last thing about the ticket thing, I wish I'd never mentioned IDs and checking. That caused a shit storm which I thought might actually shadow the event. My reasoning behind it was because yes I did hear about people selling tickets and getting multiple tickets under different names. There might have been some truth to it all but in the end we still had the 20% drop off.
So yesterday I setup the first Werewolf only night in London. It started badly, with me running late. I should have factored in 40mins from White City to Moorgate not 20mins. Plus work demands meant I was running late full stop. Turned up and the bar had set a-side a area, but it was right next to the main bar and it simply wouldn't have worked. However what had happened was a mixup on the bar's part. They had booked the wrong area. So after 15mins of drinks and talking, we moved to the private suite which held about 25 people. There was a large table which made things tricky, so our circle looked more like a squashed triangle. Anyway once a few of us had explained the rules and run through a few tatics, we were off into the 1st game.
I don't remember all the games (think we ended up playing up to 6?)but I certainly remember the one when I was a werewolf with Tiff and Frances. Sheila (australian sheila) pointed the finger at me early on because I had pointed the camera at the victim of the first night attack. I think it was a guess but she was right, so I came out as the seer. Then someone else did and after a while Sheila (aus) did too. But it started to work, I got off and started to pretend to check people every round. People started to believe after a while. And my thoughts about killing myself off to keep the werewolves winning, didn't need to happen. We won and I believe the other werewolves never got fingered once. It was certainly an adrenalin rush and couldn't help but stand up and put my arms up in the air at the end. Harry was gutted because he never believed me as the seer then slowly started to believe and so got taken in by my lies. Oh well thats the way it goes… Deception is such a great thing.
So without going into more detail about the games played, we had roughtly at one point 17 or 18 people enough for 3 werewolves, a seer and a healer. The smallest game was 14 people with 2 werewolves and a seer. Everyone enjoyed the night and would happily go to another one. So I'm going to speak to the venue about removing the table next time and maybe getting a large food order at the start of the game instead. Maybe it might also be worth spending money on getting all our drinks delivered to the room, so the breaks between won't be so long? As usual there's my pictures here and public pictures here.
