It was about a year ago I sat down and did the math and figured out that Werewolf is essentially a solved problem. It made me sad. Jane has a long great blog post up on the same topic. Which for some reason doesn’t make her as sad.

Interestingly enough their experiment this year with their zero werewolves variant was run as con game. I’ve seen (and/or heard) about this run differently.

Shuffled role decks is one way, nobody knows who is in play, but everybody knows no one knows. (this rather nicely scotches Optimal Villager Strategy)

Another variant that evolved in the rapidly mutating (under pressure presumably) game that my brother plays every Friday is werewolves choosing targets in turn, and the villager only dies if a majority of remaining werewolves managed to pick the same target. (“Werewolf 1 wake up”, “Werewolf 1 go back to sleep”, “Rover wake up”, etc) This makes for several meta games, where werewolves are under pressure to share information, villagers are confused, and there are valid strategic reasons for killing off your fellow wolves. (they were too hard to communicate with) No seer needed.