Jack Reda wrote:In 2007, I was first introduced to the game Werewolf. I was at a Meetup in Herndon, with about 18 people, and I thoroughly enjoyed the game. We only used about 3 different roles, and I suspected that there were several others. When I got home later that night, I poked around BGG and read up on the many variants and different roles for the game. Being someone who loves to tinker with games, I started to try my hand at creating my own roles, and ended up with a custom set of Werewolf with close to 200 roles.

Getting to play with all of the custom roles was more challenging. I have been part of several local gaming groups, but we rarely have more than 6 or 7 players together at one time. Being able to play Werewolf was a fairly uncommon experience. I've managed it here and there, and I have tried playing it online (which while fun, is not quite the same experience).

So I began to think about how to come up with a Werewolf experience that could be achieved with a much smaller set of players.

While I was at it, I started thinking of the aspects of Werewolf that aren't as much fun. One is the moderator. It's a necessary role for someone to fill, and most of the time someone is more than willing to do it. Still, on a few occasions, no one was eager to run the game. So, I wanted my smaller-scaled version to work without a moderator.

The other thing was player elimination. I certainly have been in games where I was the first person eliminated. A lot of the time, I've seen the eliminated players wander off and start a completely different game on their own. They were out early, so they didn't see the point of waiting to find out who would win. Player elimination was unfortunately one of the road blocks to getting a large group to agree to play Werewolf some times.

So, player elimination was something that also needed to be addressed.

In Black Forest, it is possible for a player to be eliminated, but it's not easy. This is because each player actually controls a few Villager tokens. Each player can lose a few of their villagers in the game, either from werewolf attack, or getting outvoted at the Court House. In a 4 player game, each player has 4 Villager tokens (including the player who is the werewolf).

Going with giving each player 4 Villagers lent itself well to the idea of a "Worker Placement" type game. From there, the idea of having a board that depicted several areas of the village, each providing a different type of action, made sense to me.

When I started designing Black Forest, there were only 9 areas. I wanted to provide players with a way to earn Coins (which would be used for measuring the success of the Harvest, and also buying Market cards, paying taxes), a way to try picking off the werewolf's tokens, and some way to simulate the Seer's ability.

After a few test games, I decided that a few more locations in the village would enhance the game, and subsequently added the Town Square, Guilds, and Carpenter. I was also toying with the idea of making each location a two-sided tile, like those in Ghost Stories or Blue Moon City, and a conversation with a friend who is a well respected game designer confirmed it. This notion of "upgrading" the areas of the village put even more emphasis on the Coins, and making upgrading all 12 tiles a victory condition for the non-werewolf players provided some incentive.

The next thing I had to figure out was how to let the werewolf player attack players and eliminate their Villager tokens. It needed to be done without a moderator, and not give away the werewolf player's identity. This led me to using card drafting.

Players would be dealt cards from a deck of "Night" cards. In it there would be cards called "Werewolf Attack", that the werewolf player could draw and then assign to his or her victims. There would also need to be other cards that have varying effects, some good and some bad, so the players would have to make tough decisions about what to take and to whom to give the cards.

So in a 4 player game, all 4 players would end up "selecting" 4 cards. Then each player would assign one of the cards to each other player, including him or herself. Everyone would shuffle the cards they were assigned without looking at them, and then one at a time reveal what they had. This let the werewolf player target others without giving anything away. And sometimes, the werewolf player could even target him or herself, just to help sow confusion about who the werewolf was.

The card drafting part of the game had a lot of nice tension. Plus the whole game had a great sense of paranoia, as the villagers tried to read each other and figure out who was who.

Other cards in the Night deck include the Tax cards (which meddle with the villagers' ability to have a successful harvest, and another way for the werewolf player to wreak havoc), Barricades (which can protect a player from losing a token to werewolf attack), Quiet Night cards (essentially a "nothing happens" outcome), and several cards that worked directly with locations on the board, like the Church and Tavern.