How to play Small Hours

Everyone gets a card, and two go in the middle

Then one night passes, and the night resolves in a fixed order that is the whole game.

The Seer looks before anything moves, so what she saw may already be wrong. The Robber takes a card and is told what it is. The Troublemaker then swaps two other people, blind — possibly including the Robber, who is now walking around with a certainty that stopped being true forty seconds ago. The Insomniac wakes last and is the only person who finds out what happened to them.

Then you argue about it

Five minutes of talking, out loud on the call, in which everybody claims a card and most of them are wrong rather than lying.

There is no elimination and no waiting. Everybody plays every second of it.

One vote, all at once

Most votes dies. A tie kills everybody tied. If a werewolf dies the village wins.

And if enough of you name nobody, nobody dies — which is the only way to win the deal where both werewolf cards were face down in the middle the whole time.

Questions people ask

Does anybody get knocked out and have to watch?

No. There is one night, one day and one vote, and everybody plays all of it. That is the difference between this and the game most people mean, and it is the only reason a hidden-role game like this belongs in a coffee break.

Am I still the card I was dealt?

Possibly not, and that is the game. Cards move during the night without their owners being told, so the side you win with is read off the card you are holding at dawn rather than the one you started with. People argue honestly for the wrong team all the time.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Small Hours?

No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.

Do we need accounts?

No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.

How many people can play Small Hours?

3 to 10 — best with five or six. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Small Hours take?

About 10 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.

Does it work over a video call?

That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.