The Werewolf Game We Used to Play — What Has It Turned Into?

Esports reality shows, web variety shows, livestreaming platforms and capital have all poured in. But what exactly is everyone playing?

In the summer of 2007, Zhang Jialong, then a college sophomore, went to the same place almost every afternoon.

A deck of cards, a dozen or so young people sitting in a circle, playing a tabletop game called Werewolf — starting at two in the afternoon and fighting it out until three or four the next morning. For more than ten hours nobody left the table except to use the bathroom. Then home, sleep, and back the next day for another round.

"I wouldn't call it gambling, but every time my turn to speak comes around, I can feel the adrenaline spike."

"Bold jump," "check-kill," "gold water," "silver water," "turn coat and run for sheriff" — this jargon, which Werewolf players toss around and everyone else finds baffling, was not invented recently. It has circulated for more than a decade among the game's hardcore players, and only in the past two years has a much wider audience picked it up, through esports reality shows and web variety shows built around Werewolf. Zhang Jialong had a small hand in that.

On April Fools' Day 2015, Zhang Jialong, then a show producer, tried an experiment: a one-off Werewolf special that grew into the show now known as LyingMan. For many new players, that show was their introduction to Werewolf.

"Back then Zhanqi (a game livestreaming platform) still had a bit of a big-spender air about it — of the top 50 esports streamers, Zhanqi probably had half," Zhang Jialong said. He rounded up the best 12 streamers he could find and made a Werewolf special; these streamers, already famous for League of Legends, Hearthstone and DOTA, brought their own followings and pulled in the show's first viewers. "One episode cost about 20,000 yuan to make."

And now? "That's harder to say."

In September 2016, PandaTV and Douyu each launched an esports reality show of their own, PandaKill and The Temptation of the Dinner Party (《饭局的诱惑》). The latter broke out of the format built around esports streamers, inviting celebrity guests and contestants from U Can U Bibi to play Werewolf, which brought the game a much wider audience. The first season of The Temptation of the Dinner Party drew more than 500 million total views on Tencent Video.

Yu Yi, who works in law, had never played Werewolf. As a diehard fan of U Can U Bibi, she started following The Temptation of the Dinner Party, and from there her interest in Werewolf ran away with her. She now plays a few rounds with coworkers every week, and eventually went in with several of them to open a Werewolf parlor of just over 30 square meters, open only on weekends, one table a day. "We kept taking over the company conference room to play, and it seemed like that wasn't going to work forever."

Board-game shops sprouting like this are not unusual. At a board-game shop near People's Square in Shanghai, the owner said that since the second half of last year, 70% of customers have come specifically for Werewolf, and weekend occupancy can reach 80%.

"It feels like board games suddenly went from a sideshow to the main course." Zheng Weijie, who works in HR, meets friends for a Werewolf session every week or two, and they do nothing else the whole time.

Baidu's search index shows that interest in "Werewolf" started climbing sharply in the second half of 2016 and has kept growing since; over the past 30 days, total search volume was up more than 1,000% year-on-year.

Werewolf has boomed on mobile at the same time. Dozens of mobile game companies are building Werewolf products; among them, the voice-chat mobile game "Werewolf" raised several million yuan in a Series A in early March this year. Miwei Media, which made The Temptation of the Dinner Party, has also put together a team to build a Werewolf game. Ma Dong, Miwei's founder and CEO, said in an interview: "In the past two or three weeks the whole Werewolf track has suddenly heated up. A lot of people are suddenly out looking for Werewolf teams and Werewolf products, as if something on this track is about to take off."

After more than a decade of lying low, Werewolf is popular again. Plenty of people who think back to the first time they played it years ago (or played its predecessor, the Killing Game) say the same thing: it feels like a completely different game now.

1.

"Carrying feels so good."

Ask about the rush of the game and "carry" is the word that came up most in these interviews.

"Uh, I think if you asked a hundred people, all hundred would say that." Worried I couldn't grasp how satisfying it is to carry a game of Werewolf, the player added: "It's everyone else drunk and me alone sober. I'm the one who sees through it all."

Werewolf hands out roles. The "god roles," who hold the key information, have to see through the wolves' disguise. The "werewolves" have to read what other players say, catch a flicker in someone's face, knife the important characters at night and take control of the game. The "villagers," who know the least, have to tell wolves from god roles so they don't end up on the wrong side.

In this game everyone holds only a subset of the information; nobody can see everything. "If someone seems to know everything, he must be lying."

Lying is inescapable here. But to call Werewolf an elaborate lying game is too thin a description. It draws on persuasion, expression management, logical analysis, memory, leadership, teamwork and more. Players can reel off the game's plays and gambits at length, but the point is that whether you belong to the Northern school of pure logic or the Southern school of reading people's state, nobody wins every game.

"Because human nature is the most complicated thing there is, and the fun of this game is exploring it." Zheng Weijie, who has five years in HR, thinks of Werewolf as a process of judging people (in Werewolf jargon, "sussing out roles"). "My job every day is judging whether what someone says is true, whether they fit the position, what the motive behind a sentence is. It's almost exactly the same thing as this game."

Lin Andong, a fourth-year student who was on his university debate team, enjoys the satisfaction of the persuasion phase most. "The biggest rush is probably walking through the logic to convince people, or making a bold jump (a werewolf posing as the sheriff) to win the good guys' trust, or working up support for your wolf teammates. It's a bit like debate." If he runs up against a player whose case is convincing enough, Lin Andong says he'll take the deception without complaint.

This strategy-driven display of skill is a defining mark of Werewolf's second rise. Whichever ability you value most — or are best at — showing it off is where the pleasure lies.

A decade or so ago most people played Werewolf by picking up trivial physical cues: I felt the guy next to me move his arm, I heard so-and-so make a sound. Now that style is considered cheap. "Hey, don't drag in stuff from outside the game, it's no fun."

Oddly enough, although everyone talks up the thrill of carrying, winning is not a precondition for a good game.

"Once you've played Werewolf to a certain level, you'll take on a stronger player of almost any level, but you can't stand a table of players clearly worse than you." That is how one veteran summed it up.

The urge to get stronger runs that deep, and feeling yourself grow is what keeps many people coming back. It has also produced a wave of technique posts, strategy threads and post-mortem review videos online.

Watch the bullet comments on a Werewolf show and you keep seeing "second watch," "third watch," "Nth watch." Some classic games are treated as study material and rewatched again and again, which is almost unimaginable for other entertainment web shows. That is what Zhanqi saw an opening in.

2.

"Esports livestreaming and Werewolf really are a great match." Zhang Jialong has gone back over the idea many times since, and still can't help feeling pleased with it.

Before Werewolf, the gaming world had already tried reality shows such as Go! DOTA (《加油！DOTA》). Reality shows normally have a script and the director's team expects the cast to follow it. The trouble is that esports streamers aren't actors and can't deliver a script. Werewolf needs little scripting or direction, because the game produces conflict on its own and demands constant talking and clashing — which happens to put the streamers' quick tongues and personalities on display.

Werewolf has always been popular in esports. Zhang Jialong worked as an esports editor after graduating and watched top players gather privately to play it. "So when streamers come in to record, it isn't what outsiders assume, where they demand a huge appearance fee. A lot of them just think it's fun." Zhang Jialong said Zhanqi kept the recording fees it paid its own streamers relatively low.

"And look at it from the other side: once the show took off, a streamer starts thinking, I'm your top streamer — why am I not on your top show?"

In its first months LyingMan also tried the Killing Game and Texas Hold'em, hoping to make a show about psychological deception in general rather than one tied to Werewolf, which is why it was named LyingMan. But the other games didn't livestream as well. In Texas Hold'em, for instance, you can't keep talking if you want to win, or people read you — which made for dull viewing. Werewolf became Zhanqi's flagship original content.

Beyond the pull of the game itself, the show kept testing new ways to cut it. It dropped the flat, straightforward broadcast and introduced a "witch's perspective" and a "villager's perspective"; viewers, too, couldn't see who the werewolves were or how they moved at "night" (the "everybody close your eyes" phase before play begins).

"Because we do bullet-comment livestreaming, we take that culture seriously — we watch what everyone is saying," Zhang Jialong told QDaily. In the early episodes, streamers who slipped up got savaged in the comments, but the game is far harder than it looks.

"Once you take away the god's-eye view, watching the stream feels more participatory." The flood of predictions and comments viewers post from a player's point of view has become one of the big draws of Werewolf livestreams.

3.

"When JY and the others were poached, of course we panicked."

A run of popular LyingMan guests — JY, 09 and PDD among them — left one after another, and the shape of Werewolf reality-show livestreaming changed with them.

In mid-2016, PandaTV put together a Werewolf show of the same kind, SuperLiar, very fast. Beyond the similar format, it took away a batch of LyingMan's core guests outright. Zhanqi hit back hard, announcing it would sue for infringement and publishing side-by-side comparisons alleging plagiarism. Poaching is routine in livestreaming, but at the time it was without question a real blow to LyingMan.

So do people watch Werewolf livestreams for the star players, or for high-level play? Views differ, and arguments run both ways online. LyingMan seems to have settled on its own answer.

"Over the past year we did take a defensive strategy, and we'll keep to it this year," Zhang Jialong told QDaily. Seven or eight game platforms had been running neck and neck, burning cash to grab resources. "With things like that, streamer prices were at a peak, and we didn't think we had to fight for people right at that moment, because that kind of cash-burning can't last long."

The outsized market of the past year pulled more people into streaming as a career, while some of the cash-burning platforms have already fallen behind. "There are more sellers now and fewer buyers. Streaming has gone from a seller's market back to a buyer's market." By Zhang Jialong's account, LyingMan has gradually turned into a Werewolf reality show that grows unknowns into stars; using offline board-game bars as its channel, Zhanqi now picks the contestants for the sixth season through regional qualifiers.

It's fair to say star players mattered more to Werewolf's second rise than anyone expected. At first many viewers really did come for the names of esports legends. Now, to plenty of people who follow no esports at all, JY is simply "the number one wolf king on the Chinese server." His reach spread beyond esports long ago.

Star players like JY, Erlong and Shentu stayed busy in mobile-game and offline Werewolf competitions even after leaving the reality-show platforms.

On March 10, JYClub, JY's offline Werewolf venue, opened on Hongmei Road in Shanghai. An all-star match billed as a Beijing-Shanghai showdown peaked at more than one million viewers on PandaTV's livestream, though JYClub's 35 yuan an hour is far above an ordinary board-game shop. Baobao, a college sophomore, said: "I might go once to see JY, but going regularly would be a bit dumb."

At the usual board-game shop rate of 40 yuan a head, a shop in a first-tier city like Shanghai or Beijing can only just break even. Zhao has run a board-game shop in Shanghai since 2009, paying 20,000 to 30,000 yuan a month in rent; even with business picking up over the past year, he barely covers the rent.

JYClub is plainly not trying to make its money selling hours. It wants to turn itself into a national platform for Werewolf competition and build a new entertainment franchise. Huang Zhenyi, JYClub's operations manager, said in an interview that annual rent for the Shanghai club is around 1 million yuan, that it projects monthly revenue of 600,000 yuan, and that JYClub's development horizon is conservatively about five years.

4.

"Playing Werewolf while you eat or jog is nothing now. I've seen people play while driving, which is terrifying." Before this interview Lin Andong had been playing the mobile game Tiantian Werewolf; he plays a few rounds on his phone every night before bed. "Getting 12 people together offline is just too much trouble."

Playing online falls well short of playing face to face, but Werewolf mobile games do meet a real need for some players, and they have lowered the barrier again. Platforms like YY rolled out browser versions of Werewolf years ago, but the atmosphere and the user numbers then were nothing like today's.

Among the dozens of Werewolf mobile games on the market, Tiantian Werewolf used its close ties to livestreaming platforms to gather a large first batch of users and found its footing quickly. The first line of its App Store description reads "the exclusive title-sponsor app of PandaTV's PandaKill," and the Chinese blurb reels off a string of famous players — JY, PDD, Shentu, Yinliao, Taozi, Erlong — as if to suggest that if you play Tiantian Werewolf, one day you might get a game with JY.

Tiantian Werewolf launched on the App Store at the end of 2016. It now has more than 3 million users and roughly 300,000 daily active users, and has ranked in the top ten of Apple's free social apps chart for months.

As the only Werewolf mobile game on the market with video, Tiantian Werewolf pushes users to show their faces, rewarding those who do with 20 or 30 extra seconds of speaking time. Most people still find ways to block the camera, which has produced a class of "cash players" who hold a 100-yuan note with Mao's face on it up to the lens, hoping to hide their own face and pass the face check for the reward at the same time.

For now the business models differ from company to company. Shoulang's revenue comes mainly from selling skins, while Tiantian Werewolf's model is closer to a livestreaming platform's, letting users buy and send virtual gifts. Before Werewolf, livestreaming was the investment story of 2016; now the two are joining up. So far Werewolf hasn't found a business model of its own. For a game that has built its own language and a large body of loyal players, the payoff seems to land on socializing. You may have noticed that Tiantian Werewolf is filed under social apps, not games.

5.

"A girl told me, 'I have no choice, all I can do is appeal to our relationship.' That felt so good to hear." The game was over, and Zheng Weijie was still turning it over.

In fact the girl who said it had no relationship with him at all. The two had met for the first time that day at the Werewolf table, and he didn't even know her name.

"Sorry to ask, but who was the girl playing Player No. 1 today?" After hesitating a moment, he posted the question anyway, in a WeChat group of more than 60 people. For Zheng Weijie, Werewolf is genuinely fun as a game, but set against the social motive the ratio is about 2 to 8 — with 8 on the social side.

Plenty of people feel the same way, and why wouldn't they? Compared with karaoke, a meal or a day trip out of town, hours of face-to-face talk and eye contact make Werewolf far better at closing the distance between people. Even strangers meeting for the first time come out of a six- or seven-hour session with some idea of each other's temperament and way of handling things.

"How many people are really chasing the peak of competitive Werewolf? A lot of guys play this game just to talk to girls." That's how one male player put it.

Werewolf is becoming a way for young people to socialize, and one of the cheapest going. A Shanghai woman who goes by Qian Zaoshui did the arithmetic and concluded that going out for dinner and a movie with her boyfriend every weekend was worse value than calling up their respective friends for a game of Werewolf.

Take Shanghai: a board-game shop charges 50 yuan a head on weekends and you can play from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m.; add takeout and milk tea and it still comes to under 100 yuan a person. Lately she has found something cheaper still — skip the board-game shop and rent a serviced apartment. With 13 or more people (including one moderator, known in the game as God), splitting the room works out to 35 yuan each.

How long their enthusiasm lasts this time, nobody knows.

Appendix: Werewolf — Werewolf, also called simply Wolves, needs 8 to 18 players in its standard version. The game has two sides, werewolves and villagers. The villagers win by voting the werewolves out; the werewolves hide among the villagers and win by killing at night and voting villager-side players out. The main roles include the werewolf, the seer, the villager, the witch, cupid, the hunter and the guard.

(Interviewees in this article, including Baobao and Qian Zaoshui, are pseudonyms.)

Cover image source: weidu8