Wolf Among Fools

Wolf Among Fools is a solo social-deduction game. It takes the classic Werewolf pitch, but all roles are filled by NPCs walking around at night fulfilling their different objectives. The player is tasked with investigate by placing traps and trackers around the town to identify the different villagers behaviors, and ultimately catch the werewolf before too many innocents are killed.

Check the game page, download, and play Wolf Among Fools here:

The jam theme was "The calm before the storm". We love social deduction games, and we felt the theme could be a good match with the feel of "calm" investigation and deduction during the day, followed by the plotting and murdering during the night, BUT - within a solo experience.

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The main challenge was to create a game that is replayable and evokes a sense of uncertainty, without feeling too random or impossible to solve.

We quickly realized we needed well-defined and different roles, but also they needed to have some behaviors in common. The objective being to let the player speculate and gather more clues each night about the potential role of each villager.

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For example, the hunter and the werewolf would both harm villagers, one by going out hunting at night, the other by shooting everyone walking outside their door. We then even added the possibility for the player to harm villagers themselves by placing beartraps around.

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After a night ends, the game shows which villagers have been wounded, blood indicating where it happened, and so the player can start to connect the dots...

We created and connected all the interacting systems as soon as possible, allowing us to test and get a feel for how the game played. Especially how the different roles all interacted with one another. This allowed us to deepen the systems connections and fix what didn't work.

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The werewolf hunting behavior seemed too random at first, so we added a rule: The werewolf is attracted to the smell of blood, and hunts for wounded villagers first. This means if they attack a villager during a night, and injures them, they will probably go for them as well the next night, so the player knows what to expect and can plan accordingly.

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It also organically creates interactions, like the possibility for the player to harm a villager on purpose with a bear trap to use them as bait for the wolf on the following night!

Conclusion: Bear traps are funnier than ink bottles!

And this is also true in the game. We initially balanced the game to limit the use of the most valuable items (like traps). After some tries, though, we changed it to push players toward items were more risky but also often more unpredictable and fun.