The Tao of Gaming

I have a new XBox and regional Bridge tournament this week.

I'm not in the cult of Werewolf ... but if a game took 10 minutes? I just got to try Looney Labs' Are you the Traitor?. The game went over like a lead balloon; but I liked what I saw.

RUtT combines Werewolf with a favorite of mine, Kutschfahrt. The great gimmick (in both cases) is that an accusation ends it. Neither game can drag on. If the accuser is correct his side wins. In RUtT's case, you win or lose that round, and each winner gets a treasure card.

But the core is the round. You get dealt one of four roles:

• Keyholder (Good)
• Guard (Good)
• Traitor (Evil)
• Wizard (who knows?)

Once the roles are revealed, the round continues until one player points to another and yells "stop!" (or whatever).

• The keyholder wants to give the key to the good wizard. She ends the round by pointing to a wizard and yelling stop. If the wizard is good, the good team wins, otherwise, evil wins.
• An Evil wizard wins by point to the keyholder. Anyone else, and evil fails.
• Guards win by capturing one of the traitors. (Presumably if they attack the evil wizard directly, they get smashed).
• Traitors aren't allowed to make accusations.

But here's the catch, and why our game didn't go over so well. In the 4 player game, you have one of each role. But when you get more players, then you get some additional information. Every non-wizard knows who the keyholder is (the wizards close their eyes). And all the traitors know each other.

So traitors want to tell the evil wizard who the keyholder is. But if they just come out and say it, the guard will nab them and they lose. Either wizard wins if the keyholder points to them, but they can both claim to be good, but if evil figures out the keyholder, he can win.

My group didn't like it, but partially that's because you have to figure the rules out ... quickly. In fact, I 'won' one round because everyone was pausing, and I realized that another player had enough time to figure out a reasonable-odds gamble but hadn't acted, so he was probably the traitor (who can't accuse). Sadly I misremembered the rule on who I should I accuse. Still, it was like one of those math puzzles where, on the 38th night all the wives murder their husbands. (If you don't know, don't ask).

In fact, my chief concern is that each round will be too fast. The keyholder can make a 50/50 accusation at any time. Guards can usually get the same odds on someone as a traitor (since they'll know the wizards, and keyholder, if the game is large enough). Perhaps their should be a slight penalty for the false accusation (beyond not being on the winning team).

The other concern is that each member of the winning team gets a treasure, which are worth 0-5 points. 10 points wins. That's pretty random for such a clever game (and there are a few treasures that let you steal other treasures, except for those that block it). In the one hand, that's easy to remove, but it also means that you will sometimes sway between palatable accusations, because you may set things up so that if you are wrong, the leader will be on the losing side.

I've added "Play RUtT with 6 or more" to my gaming To-Do list. And I don't particularly care for Werewolf. If you like it, I imagine RUtT a must try.

Update: There may be a rule I'm forgetting, like "Good wizards also win by capturing the traitors" ... we only played 2-3 rounds and I didn't get every role down pat.