Show HN: A Werewolf bot for Slack

[anonfunction]

I've never heard of this game, maybe a description or link to a wikipedia page[1] in the readme would be good.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)

[jschulenklopper]

And there is this great story in Wired on the history and popularity of this game, especially at tech conferences: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/03/features/wer...

[giancarlostoro]

I've played it as "Mafia" but never as "Werewolf" so thanks for the informed link.

[bass_case]

Good suggestion, I added to Readme

[abcd_f]

Now also in a movie format - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDpSwl-fJcU

[qwertyuiop924]

As I don't use Slack, I'm totally building an IRC version of this. Actually, I'd prefer frontend-agnostic, so I can hook the logic to IRC/matrix/XMPP/websockets.

[anonfunction]

If you're a rubyist check out Lita[1] which is a ruby bot framework that has many adapters[2] to work with various chat services like IRC, slack, etc...

1. https://github.com/litaio/lita

2. https://www.lita.io/plugins

[bass_case]

I'm down to build this into this project. Build an IRC client in ReactPHP (async websocket pkg) and we'll work towards the necessary abstraction to make the game logic completely secular.

[xena]

https://github.com/nickrw/TWGbot works for me

[qwertyuiop924]

I've actually been looking at scheme. I need the practice, and it has enough frontends to make it work. Also, there is CHICKEN's C FFI, which is amazing.

But ruby might be good, too.

[chrislloyd]

So awesome :) Thanks for putting this together. I'd love to see a Secret Hitler bot next!

[sandij]

Nice, in my experience online Werewolves can be fun when you know each other well but live far away. So I could imagine it working with teams on Slack. How were your experiences thus far?

I built https://github.com/sander/lunacy for a similar purpose (CouchDB + Node + AngularJS). After a few months it did become a bit boring, I think mainly because the stakes are lower when dropping out of a game doesn’t actually mean having to sit and watch others continue to play live (you can just quit the app), and because the lack of facial expressions that can give away roles.

[RodericDay]

Have you tried out The Resistance?

[jayhuang]

Resistance is one of my favourite games of this type. It's great when you have 2 or 3 really talky people. Kind of falls apart when everyone is quiet though.

[bass_case]

Yep, I'm a fan of Resistance and Avalon as well. I think I prefer Werewolf and One Night Werewolf more.

[purpled_haze]

This is neat, but I still wonder where people get the time to play games like this.

[forrestthewoods]

We played Secret Hitler in the office as part of a games day. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maxtemkin/secret-hitler

[lambda]

Take a little time off from checking HN?

[bass_case]

Between 12pm and 1pm, or after 6pm haha :P

[at-fates-hands]

Used to work at a startup and after 3pm Thurs and Fri, our sys admin would set up a server for Counter Strike for the developers.

Man I miss those days. . .

[xerophyte12932]

My coworker and I happen to have a very strict One Slime schedule. Even slack bot knows about it and gets excited

[eru]

At work..

[WA]

Small nitpick: That screenshot shows a situation which shouldn't occur in the game. If there's only 1 player left, he's the winner. So I wonder: Is there a winning condition built in?

[pavel_lishin]

I wonder why it's written in PHP. Seems like an odd choice.

[bass_case]

It's what I'm most familiar with and I didn't want to spend a lot of time building it.

There is a great Slack RTM client written with ReactPHP (http://reactphp.org/) that I took advantage of.

[zorrb]

Really cool. I built something similar in python for giggles a couple months ago [1]. One day I'll get around to implementing other roles. Honestly the most fun part of it was co-workers hilarious attempts to break the script. ```!vote DROP TABLES```

https://github.com/nickweinberg/werewolf-slackbot

[an4rchy]

It's a fun group game... glad to see another addition to the growing list of Slack games...

[arcatek]

Lycanobot is an IRC bot with much more roles:

http://dotsec.fr/index.php/Lycanobot

[kiernanmcgowan]

Very cool! I wonder how the game dynamic changes when people are not required to be in the same room as each other.

[entelect]

Anyone know how to host this on Heroku?

[itake]

ha, this is perfect. love it. sharing