I like Bang! better: http://www.amazon.com/BANG-La-Pallottola-The-Bullet/dp/B0010...

Battlestar Gallactica is also very similar: http://www.amazon.com/Fantasy-Flight-Games-BSG01-Battlestar/...

Actually, my friends and I play BSG, and the similarities are what drew me to this game. I would play Werewolf over BSG if only because I don't have the unpack/setup/teardown/pack time we have with BSG.

If you want little setup, Bang! is pretty good. Setup is like setting up a poker game. Betting on it makes it even more interesting.

My friends and I play The Resistance (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41114/the-resistance), which is along the same lines, with some traitors secretly mixed into the rest of the group. The difference is, unlike in Werewolf (or Mafia), nobody gets eliminated, so nobody has to sit out for virtually the entire game.

I played this game as an intern at Microsoft in the summer of 2006 and subsequently introduced it to many students in the computer engineering department at the University of Florida. It makes for an interesting study in group psych if you can find people who are tolerant of how unfair it can sometimes be.

We play a forum version of the game (Mafia): http://mafiascum.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Lotta fun.

How did this article manage to reach the front page of Hacker News?

Although the game is good, it is not new.

Like Toddward said, I saw it in the Matt Cutts article earlier. Sorry for cluttering up the front page, I had just never heard of it before.

Matt Cutts mentioned it in a blog post earlier - must have piqued the interest of people who had never heard of it.

That's pretty much right on. My apologies to the geek gods for not knowing about this game earlier!