by Jack Quire
In VAMPY, there are three main places that our campers socialize during their day: the classroom, the dining hall, and the individual dorm floors that each camper lives on. Within my hall, there has been one game that has unified my group of thirteen boys and enhanced their social time to be social. That game is One Night Ultimate Werewolf.
The way ONUW works is similar to the game Mafia. Each person playing has a role and the goal of the game is to deduce who the werewolf or werewolves are. The game starts with drawing a card, learning your character, and placing that card down in front of you. The narrator, who can choose to play or not, asks everyone to go to sleep. The narrator then asks for each character individually to wake up and perform his skill attributed to the character. These skills can include switching two players’ cards, looking at a single player’s card, stealing another player’s card in place of the thief’s. If there are two werewolves, they have the opportunity to wake up and find each other. Ultimately by the end of the night, many nefarious events have occurred, and the goal of the werewolves is to lie and stay alive, while the other characters try to figure out who the werewolves are.
In my hall, we have a lot of good liars! Werewolves can lie and assume any role they want, and sometimes if two players’ cards are switched, someone becomes the new werewolf even if he did not know it.
When my campers asked me to play once, my first card was the werewolf, and in the spirit of the game, I told them the truth: “I am the werewolf.” My oldest camper, Lorenzo Mahoney of Prospect, looked at me, puzzled over this move. He was also a werewolf in this round and thought my statement was a sure-fire way to lose. Instead, we won twice with this strategy. In a game full of lies, the truth is least trusted.
This game takes up most of my campers’ time when we have hall time to play it, and I am happy that it does. All of my campers have grown closer because of it, and it has allowed me personally to get to know all of them better.