How Werewolf works

The day and night loop

A game alternates between a day phase and a night phase until one faction has met its victory conditions. Extended games run 12-hour days and 12-hour nights, so a full cycle takes a day; speed rounds compress the same structure into minutes. Nothing about the rules changes between the two formats, only how long you get to think.

The day is where the game is actually played. Players talk, put together whatever fragments of evidence exist, and vote in public. Votes can be changed at any point, and everyone can see who is voting for whom, so the vote itself is a piece of evidence rather than just a tally. At nightfall the player with the most votes is executed. A tie executes nobody, and most games also let the village deliberately choose not to execute. The first day is short and carries no execution at all: it is orientation, and evil players do not get their private night chat until the first night is announced.

Night is where the evidence is manufactured. Evil factions talk privately and choose their victims, roles with abilities pick their targets, and everything resolves at once when the night ends. You are not told during the night whether your action worked. You are told in the morning what it produced, if it produced anything, which means a silent morning is itself ambiguous: you may have been blocked, redirected, or simply have learned nothing.

One rule cuts across both phases: you must cast a vote at least once every two days. Fail to for two days running and you are smited out of the game, because a player who has stopped participating distorts the count for everyone still playing. The full ground rules, including what you may not do with role information, are on the rules page. For the loop in more detail, and for the game formats, see how to play Werewolf online.

Where information comes from, and where it goes

Most mechanical information arrives as a night check. Checks differ in what they return, and that difference matters more than which role performed it. The Seer returns an alignment phrase and never a role name. The Gravedigger returns an actual role. The Stalker and the Harlot return movement rather than identity, telling you that somebody visited without telling you why. Treating an alignment read as if it were a role read is one of the more reliable ways for a village to talk itself into a bad execution.

Information is destroyed at least as readily as it is produced. A kill removes a source. A roleblock removes a night's output, and the blocked player learns only that they were blocked, not what they would have seen. An identity swap leaves a report intact but attaches it to the wrong name. Auras go further and change the answer itself: a Lycan, or a player marked by the Bloodletter, reads as Wolfpack to a Seer who did nothing wrong at all. When two honest claims contradict each other, look for an effect sitting between the player and the reading before you assume one of them is lying.

It is worth saying plainly that role information is not the only information. Somebody noticing an inconsistency, voicing a suspicion, or arguing a case well produces evidence that no ability generates. A villager with no night action who decides they are useless until they roll something better is not neutral; they are actively costing the village the one resource it has more of than anyone else. The Seer might already be dead. The village still has to solve the game.

Every kind of check, grouped by what it returns and what it cannot tell you, is on intel checks.

Factions, and what each one needs

The village is the uninformed majority. It has no shared knowledge at the start and wins by removing every evil player from the game, which in practice means executing them, since the village has limited ability to kill at night. Almost every other faction wins on parity instead: their faction reaches at least half of the living players, at which point the village can no longer out-vote them.

Parity alone is usually not enough. The Wolfpack also has to see off the Coven, the Vampires and the Undead, and each of those factions carries the mirror-image condition against the others. Vampires are the notable exception, counting parity per basement and able to win with a rival faction still standing. The practical consequence is that evil factions in the same game are not quietly on the same side; two evil teams sharing a lobby are each other's problem as much as the village is.

Victory is checked twice a cycle, at dawn and at nightfall, after any execution has been carried out. Exactly one faction wins. There are no shared victories and no draws, so a position that looks like a stalemate is really a position where somebody is still counting. The full conditions, including the neutral roles that win on their own terms, are on victory conditions.

What one night action does to another

Night actions are submitted independently and resolved together, so most of the depth in the game engine is in what happens when two of them collide. There are four things one action can do to another: redirect it somewhere else, block it from happening, protect its target from it, or bypass a protection that would otherwise have stopped it.

Which one wins is decided by resolution order rather than by who acted first. Redirects go first, so the Succubus can move an action before anyone else gets to use it. Roleblocks come next, which is why the Direwolf, the Courtesan and the Manacles of Spite take out so much of a night. Protection is placed after that, then ordinary visits, then thefts, then kills. Some kills, such as the Militia's, are built to go straight through protection, and roles like the Vampire cannot be roleblocked at all.

Three consequences catch people out. Being killed does not stop your own action: if you die tonight, whatever you did tonight still happens. Protections do not stack into something stronger, but every effect attached to them still fires, so a Protector and a Huntsman covering the same player against the same attack will both trigger, and the Huntsman will die doing it. And reports are taken before identity swaps by the Djinn and the Shapeshifter resolve, so a swap can never change which player dies, only which character is announced dead, and intel can already be out of date by the time you read it.

The exact sequence, and how ties inside a category are settled, is on night action order.

Items and auras: the layer on top of roles

Your role is fixed for the game, but two systems sit on top of it and change what it can do or how it reads. The first is items. Some are consumed on use, like the Wolf Pelt and Steel Armour, which absorb one attack and are then gone. Others persist and carry an ability or a check of their own, like the Vibra Rune. Items can be passed at night, stolen and destroyed, so a claim backed by an item is only ever as good as the claim to be holding it.

The second is auras: statuses attached to a player rather than to a role. Some are dealt out in the setup, others are applied mid-game by an ability or an item. They cover a wide range. Poisoned works on a timer, Enduring and Tough absorb a death, Inebriated degrades what a player gets back from their own ability. The important category is the one that changes how a player is read without changing what they are, which is where most apparently impossible contradictions between two honest players come from. Players are not always told which auras they carry, which is why the Aura Seer can see something about a target the target does not know about themselves.

Both layers mean a role page is where reasoning about a player starts, not where it finishes. Browse them at items and auras.

What the interface asks of you

Three panels carry everything. The identity panel holds your role, your objectives and your abilities. The village panel lists the living players and the graveyard, and is where every non-chat action is taken. The calendar panel is the archive of previous days and nights, which matters more than it sounds: a long game accumulates more than anyone can hold in their head, and going back to check what somebody actually said is a large part of playing well.

During the day, each living player has a Vote button next to their name, with a count of who is currently voting for them. A few roles have daytime abilities instead, reached through the button next to your own name. At night the vote buttons are replaced by your role's ability buttons, and you act by pressing the button beside the player you want to target.

The one thing to internalise before your first night: most abilities cannot be cancelled. Once you have activated an ability you can change its target, but you cannot take the activation back. Decide before you press. The panels and buttons are covered properly on buttons and abilities.

Where to go next

If you have not played here before, read how to play Werewolf online next; it covers the same loop at the level of detail you need in your first game. If you already know the shape and want specifics, the role catalogue has every role in the game with its abilities, how other roles see it and how it tends to play.

None of it sticks until you use it, though. The lobby usually has a game signing up.