What is a Werewolf or Mafia game?
Werewolf, also known as Mafia, is a social deduction party game in which a few players are secretly villains, and the rest of the group must work out who they are through discussion and voting before the villains eliminate everyone else.
Each round has two phases. At night, the villains quietly choose someone to eliminate, while special roles such as a seer or a doctor use their powers in secret. By day, everyone discusses what happened, accuses each other and votes out one suspect. The game ends when the villains are gone or when they outnumber the town.
Mafia is usually credited to Dimitry Davidoff, who devised it at a Moscow university in 1986. Werewolf is the same game in a fantasy costume, and the two names are used interchangeably. A narrator runs each night, which is why the game works best with six or more players and one good talker in charge.
Video games such as Among Us carry the same idea of hidden villains. Bossfeed does not have a Werewolf game yet, but the social deduction entry in this glossary lists what to look for in one.