I was excited to try a new to me game this weekend. Werewords by Bezier Games looked like a lot of fun, but it is a social deduction game. Thankfully it’s a cheap one, so I thought it was worth a try. And I won’t say that it’s a bad game but it fell short of what it could be and that is because it fell short like most social deductions game do for me.

Playing Werewords

List most social deduction games, in this game you have two teams. There are the villagers and the werewolves. The game plays out with one person being the mayor, they can also be a werewolf, and they pick a word from an app. Then you basically play 20 questions with the mayor answering yes and no questions and handing out tokens fo

There are two other roles to know in the game. The first is that the werewolf sees there word as well. So they are trying to deflect people away from the right answer. And there is the Seer who is trying to nudge people in the right direction. If the word is guessed the werewolf gets one guess as to who the seer is, if they get it right they win. On the flip side, if the group doesn’t guess the word, they get a chance to guess who the werewolf is to win.

What Didn’t Work?

Let me start off by saying, the top probably told you it didn’t work great for me. And I’ll say, that’s because it ran into the number social deduction problem for me. Playing a fast paced 20 questions, well, I’ll get to that, but let’s talk about the social deduction aspect.

My issue with most social deduction games is that you don’t really have anything to go on. You have a few pieces of information, and while this one does a better job it doesn’t help that much. At the end, you tend to have a lot of people with wrong guesses. So it seems like there might be strategy with good number of guesses out there, does the Werewolf hang back or the Seer, but really you tend to have everyone asking a fair number of questions and getting a fair number wrong.

Then you need to try and remember who asked good questions, again, that seems like strategy but at the start people either ask seemingly bad questions or actually asking bad questions. So as the villagers/seer you don’t feel like you have enough information to guess after a minute of discussing or as the werewolf unless the seer gets everything right the information is still very limited.

What Worked?

The speed of the game is good. As much as I knock it for my normal social deduction problems, this game gives you a very short game time. Four minutes to guess and do you 20 questions and a minute for guessing who the werewolf is, or thirty seconds for guessing the seer. Comparing this to Secret Hitler, this game plays way faster with basically as much information going around, which I like. And it’s similar time frame to One Night Ultimate Werewolf with more meaningful information.

I also like the 20 questions aspect of it. It’s fun to do speed 20 questions. And I think that it’s pretty entertaining to do that. is it enough for a game, kind of. I like it, and I think it worked. Kind of like My Farm Shop, I do wonder a little bit about the complexity of the game, or the interesting moments in the game. Are there enough of them that will keep me coming back to 20 questions?

Who Is Werewords For?

This game is definitely for people who love social deduction games. It is a very different version than you get with stuff like One Night Ultimate Werewolf. I think that people who like that type of game will like the speed and fun of this game. The 20 question is a nice twist on it.

If you don’t like social deduction games, I don’t think will change your mind. Werewords is better for me than something like Secret Hitler or Donner Dinner Party and One Night Ultimate Werewolf. But it still feels like what it is at it’s core. A game which has you guessing on who is who. The amount of lack of information stands out.

Final Thoughts

I am still at a place where only Deception: Murder in Hong Kong stands out to me as a social deduction game that I love. Werewords won’t be cracking into my Top 100, though, I do like it better than a lot. Is it going to stay in my collection? I really do not know. It might for a little bit. Why, because I like it better than most. And it’s a genre of game that works well in big groups. Still, I like Deception so much better, will I play Werewords then?

My Grade: C
Gamer Grade: C
Casual Grade: A