Has anyone played Werewolves/Mafia/Killer?

[wen]

Kinda curious if anyone plays this game.
Essentially, players are either werewolves, or villagers. During the night, the werewolves eat a person, and during the day, the villagers try to lynch a werewolf by debate.

I've gone to a few conventions where it's been wildly popular, and I'm wondering if you've played or heard of it.

[Lazy Leopard]

It's a game which works quite well at a Con where you can get hold of a room with enough chairs and the minimum of other distractions. Oh, and find enough like-minded folk to play with, of course.

A lot hinges on the experience of the game master. Boardgamegeek seems to think it works best with between 12 and 16 players, and I guess that may be so if everyone knows the game fairly well, but I've found games with more than a dozen players get cumbersome quite quickly.

[Tuttle]

I'd agree with BBG that it works best with 12-16 people actually. You need enough people to have a long enough game for the strategy to really come out. 3 wolves, 1 healer, 1 seer, 7 villagers is a really good simple set of roles. When you get into more complicated sets of roles then adding more players means more.

I've found it basically doesn't work with fewer than 10 players.

[Lazy Leopard]

I suspect it works better with more players only when all the players have learned enough about the game to take strategy past the basic level. Most of the games I've played have involved at least a few folks playing it for the first or second time, and then it helps to have slightly fewer players.