about

XPManchester

A Manchester usergroup based around Xtreme Programming and related practices. The group balances its sessions between technical practise and theoretical discussion.

I've been helping to facilitate the group for around a decade now, and have run a number of the sessions and several of the full day workshops

XPManchester meets on the second Thursday of each month.

werewolv.es

After playing the in person game of werewolf (see below) at a Barcamp many, many years ago, I became hooked. So much so that in 2011 I made my own version of werewolf online so that myself and my fellow addicts could play together on a Monday evening, without having to travel up and down the country to do so.

I mothballed the project sometime in 2012-2013 and restarted it in 2016. Since then there's been a game running on the site each day and it's grown into a small community of its own. We even had our first international werewolf meetup in October 2019! There would have been a second by now, if a little pandemic hadn't gotten in the way.

Manchester Werewolf Chapter

There's nothing quite like meeting up with your friends on a monthly basis to have a few drinks, have a few laughs and to lie shamelessly to their faces. Werewolf is perfect for that.

Originally called Mafia by its creator and it's widely regarded as the original social deduction game. There's a small number of baddies working in secret to overthrow the goodies, and the goodies need to work out who is who before it's too late. We play with a werewolf theme instead of a mafia theme. The baddies are wolves instead of goons and the main power role on the side of the goodies is called the seer instead of the sheriff. The gameplay is the same.

The game requires a moderator to run things and co-ordinate the secret night time phase. I usually end up moderating at least one or two games a night, I've even been asked to run a game at more than one wedding.

Forget wedding discos, wedding werewolf is where it's at.