Last week was my last week with my 8th graders at Worthington Hooker School. We finished all of our work for the class and they took the final on Tuesday, leaving us three days before their graduation. The principal was awesome enough to agree to let us keep meeting those days to play games together, something they can never seem to get enough of. In particular, they love Ultimate Werewolf. So that was what we played.

The first couple of days, Wednesday and Thursday, I brought a handful of games for us to choose from, but of course that requires both that the group split up and that we play very quickly, because most of the games I own can easily go over 47 minutes, which was the length of the class. On top of that, this is a very social group of kids who know each other very well, so Ultimate Werewolf is right up their alley.

The trouble with playing Ultimate Werewolf with bright kids who know each other very well is that they can tell pretty reliably when someone is acting suspicious. They probably had about a 75% success rate identifying the werewolves and other evil team members in the daytime phase. I tried stacking the deck to favor the werewolf team, more heavily as I realized how good they were, but to no avail. We played five games, and the villagers won all but one of them.

The other unique thing about this group is how much they love the special cards. I’m not surprised because, I say again, they’re bright (and creative) kids, so they would get bored pretty quickly with just werewolf/villager/seer. Their favorites seemed to be Sasquatch and Bloody Mary, or at least those ones excited them most. Possibly it’s because those characters’ sides are variable, so they’re a unique exception, and these kids like to look for exceptions.

They also seemed to find The Idiot very amusing, but I always feel bad giving that one out.