Welcome to this, the first full week of 2008! I think I've let enough time roll by to throw Kimmie off my scent. What, that was my plan all along. I can't have people ripping me off-- inserting their wenis wherever they see fit--and the best way to prevent that is to not write anything at all, right? Sounds like a perfectly reasonable excuse, err...explanation to me. How about you, LL?
Okay, so back to business. The Friday before New Years, we gathered at Nick's house to exchange Christmas presents. No, we don't do anything on time. Nick gave Jose that little robot guy from FOX NFL Sunday that jumps around and points at people. Well, the CGI one does, I don't think this one does anything expect look like the one on TV. Actually, did he get that from Nick? I thought Wah-Kee got Jose in the name-pool, because then Kee handed him a Carolina Panthers jacket to wear when he moves down to South Carolina later this year. Oh yeah, Jose's moving to South Carolina because he met some girl online. What is the world coming to? Anyway, someone got a FOX NFL robot and someone got Jose a Panthers jacket. I think either Nick or Jose got my gift. How am I supposed to remember, it was like three weeks ago. Whoever it came from, I ended up with a Best Buy gift certificate and Michele and I each got a tickets to a movie and a gift certificate to Smokey Bones. Other gifts exchanged hands, but all I really remember are the Mojitos. I don't think it's a gay drink. Mo-ji-to.
After the gifts, Heidi announced that she had a new game/social experiment gone awry for us to play. It was called The Werewolves of Millers Hollow, and it plays pretty much the same way as Mafia, if you've ever played that, which I haven't. The story for the game goes that there is a village that is being slowly picked off one-by-one each night by werewolves. So during the daylight hours, the villagers gather in town hall or wherever villagers gather (Village Hall?) and try to weed out the werewolves by way of democracy and lynchings, the chocolate and peanut butter of lycanthrope-plagued-townships. Whoever the majority of the village accuses as the murderous beast is strung up by their necks until they're dead. Only after their death is it revealed whether the village has finally destroyed the werewolf, or just offed another one of their own dwindling numbers. The battle of wits has begun. The game is over when either all the werewolves have been hung, or when the last villager is eaten.
For replay value, and to a lesser extent, legal and moral issues, no actual blood is shed during the game. Instead, a non-playing moderator holds out a deck of cards and a group of eight or more chose one card each. On the back of the card is either a werewolf, or a villager (or one of the various subsets of villagers with special abilities). When everyone has chosen their cards, the moderator informs everyone that it is night, and all players close their eyes. Then the moderator, in our case Heidi, says the werewolves wake up, recognize each other, and chose a victim. The werewolves merely point to the unsuspecting chump, and when Heidi says it's morning everyone opens their eyes, with one person discovering they've been killed. And how do you know when you've been killed? When you've got shiny purple beads tossed at your feet. Once everyone's eyes are open, then the accusing begins. And that's when it really comes in handy to have a poker face. A poker face not being one of the things Santa left in my stocking, I was in for a long night. My problem is, I always look guilty, even when I'm just a lowly villager, which was the case in the first round when they metaphorically strung me up just because I kept smiling. Well that's just great. I was actually the Fortune Teller, a villager who is allowed to look at one person's card during the "night" each turn to try and learn the identity of the werewolf or werewolves. But instead, I sat out the rest of the game. Lousy stupid villagers. The werewolves turned out to be Wah-Kee and his girlfriend, Des. Pssh! I could have told them that. They were both even worse at lying then me.
After that first game, I managed to not get myself killed through most of the others, except for the one time I actually WAS the werewolf. For that game I was also voted as the sheriff, which is a position that gives that person two votes. But no matter what kind of math you use, two votes are never going to beat six, I was voted out, and of course I was the only werewolf and at under two minutes it was the shortest game of the night.
Several games in, Heidi passed the moderator duties onto someone else so that she could play for a while. And I got her voted out in the first round. That was perfect. Michele wasn't immune, either. During one of my stints has a werewolf I gleefully pointed to her and danced in my seat. I can't really say why I did. Maybe I was afraid that if I didn't pick her, it'd look like I was playing favorites. I wanted to keep an even playing field. I suppose I could have done that without dancing, but why do anything if you can't do it while dancing?
On Nick's first go-round as the moderator, he left out the all-important "the werewolves go back to sleep" before saying "the fortune teller wakes up" so the werewolves, including me, had our eyes wide open when Des, the fortune teller, opened hers, so we had no choice but to kill her. Rookie mistake.
I don't know how many times we played, but it seemed like Wah-Kee and especially Des turned out to be werewolves an inordinate amount of times. We didn't keep a running score, so I don't know how many times the villagers won versus the werewolves, but considering the werewolves were usually outnumbered two to six, the village got wiped out a lot more often than I would have expected. I think that says something about people being more interested in "revenge killing" for previous games than trying to win.
The final game of the night answered a question that had come up a few times earlier in night; what happens when there are only two players left; a werewolf and a villager? If the two are remaining, during the "daylight" hours, the werewolf wins, because each one would obviously claim the other was the werewolf, resulting in a draw and no lynching, and the werewolf would claim it's final victim that night. That actually happened a couple of times. But, in the case of the last game, the final two were Josh (my understudy for when I'm not around to hang out with Nick and co.) and Michele. Each accused the other of being the werewolf, which would have been a draw, but...Josh was the sheriff, so his vote counted twice. So then we had two votes for hanging Michele and one for Josh. Josh wins, right? No! Michele had the hunter card. And the hunter, if voted out, is allowed to kill any other player with their dying breath. So Josh, the sheriff/werewolf hung Michele and Michele shot Josh. Nobody wins. It was awesome.
I don't know how to end this one. I guess I'll leave you with this advise for 2008: If you're constipated, DO NOT TAKE KAOPECTATE! That stuff is for diarrhea. Taking it for the other thing makes it much, much worse.
Monday, January 07, 2008
His Hair Was Perfect
Monday, January 07, 2008
John
10 comments
10 comments:
Interesting game. I think.
Other than just pointing and accusing, do the players that get accused have the opportunity to plead their case? Or is it just point and hang?
And I do not want to know why you decided to offer that particular piece of advice.
Yes, you get to plead your case, and you can accuse someone else, it all comes down to whoever has the most votes, their time is up.
There's another card called cupido, which pairs to "lovers" together. Apart from the seemingly limitless hilarity of pairing two guys together, the point of the lovers is they are eternally linked. So if one dies, the other dies, too. It adds a whole other element, because you have to defend someone else in town hall meetings, because if the other person gets hung, that's it for you. You've got to persuade the others into picking someone else, which gets increasingly harder as the number of players shrinks. But at least that part you have some control over. On the other hand, if your lover is killed by a werewolf during the night, you're automatically dead too and there's nothing you can do about it. Lovers can be both werewolves, both villagers, or one of each, and one may not necessarily know the other's true form.
As for the other thing, well...I think I may have crapped a diamond.
Hmm. Other than a card that says, "Werewolf" or "Diner", what facts are players given to argue with? Is it like "Lifeboat" where you have to give reasons why you shouldn't be the one to get thrown overboard? (That was a popular camp game. I hated it. I could never think of a reason why I should get to live. It's kind of tough when your 8 to justify your exsistence.)
Oh. And I'm ignoring the diamond thing.
You don't really get many facts, other than that one of the villagers died during the night. There are certain villagers that might have extra clues, however. For example, the fortune teller gets to peak at one person's card per round, and if they happen to see which person is the werewolf, they might bring up that little piece of information during the meeting. If there's more than one werewolf in a game though, the fortune teller might not want to out themselves right off the bat, because even if they weed out one of the werewolves, the other would surely target them first on the next night.
There's also a "peeping girl" Before I go any further, DO NOT typre "peeping girl" into Google. Anyway the peeping girl can sneak a peak while the werewolves are awake and everyone else's eyes are closed. They can try to see who else has there eyes open, but there's a danger there, too, because if they're caught, it's more than likely the werewolves will kill instead of whoever they were going to go after to ensure their secret is safe.
Then there's the witch. For whatever reason, the townspeople have no problem with a witch living among them and the witch can be very helpful. The witch wakes up after the werewolves but before the rest of the village. Each game, the witch is allowed one potion to revive a dead person (or yourself, if you awake to find you were the one killed during the night) They also get one poison potion to kill another player. The witch doesn't get a chance to know exactly who the werewolves are, but can at least determine who ISN'T a werewolf by seeing who's dead.
It's less complicated than it sounds once you start playing.
And it took you a week to post this? How you played a game? Wow... so worth the wait. :P
It could be a fun game to play, but... it looks like it would require more than just a few people to really make it interesting.
Yeah, you need at least eight people, plus a moderator.
What, you didn't buy the Kimmie angle? Think of all the posts I prevented her from stealing!
Yeah... but if you hadn't have screwed it up... you could have been stealing her posts.
Yeah but you should have read Jose's version.
I think all that game stuff was just a ruse to hide the fact that the post was really about constipation, and taking the wrong remedy for it. Kind of like when you need to buy something embarrassing, like condoms or kaopectate, and you buy a whole lotta other innocuous stuff to make it less obvious that the only reason you are in the store is for the embarrassing item.
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