One Night Ultimate Werewolf is one of our favorite games. We play it a ton and it’s actually the number one in our list of the best social deduction games. We regularly play the game with expansions and in this review article we round up what we think is the best One Night expansion and why.
Important: Note that unless specifically indicated otherwise, these expansions require the One Night Ultimate Werewolf base game
to be playable.
to be playable. Quick Links
1. One Night Ultimate Super Villains
- Family friendly (no killing or monsters)
- Best characters
- Standalone game
Further, Super Villains packs the most value of any of the One Night Ultimate games. It contains rehashes of some of the best characters in One Night Ultimate Werewolf, the Daybreak expansion, and the Aliens expansion. But, the flip side of this is that if you already own all those One Night games, Super Villains contains only one new character for you.
Super Villains is a standalone game and can be played without the original One Night Werewolf. It can also be combined with the original One Night as well as the other expansions, but keep in mind that some of the other expansions contain monsters. If you want to play Super Villains together with an expansion, Aliens is probably the other most child friendly expansion.
Because of the nicer art, the great selection of characters and the ability to play it as a standalone, Super Villains is our favorite One Night expansion. We definitely recommend it!
- Players: 3 - 10
- Duration: 10 - 15 minutes
- For advanced One Night players
- Introduces crazy events through app
The major complicating factor in this expansion is that so many characters have ulterior motives. For example, there’s two aliens that want to kill each other (which makes the game tricky for the Alien team), there’s a guy that wants someone who sits next to him to die, and there’s someone that targets a few players and then tries to keep them alive. With all these motives it’s very hard to figure out who wants who to die and why.
The second addition of this expansion is the ripple. The ripple is an event that happens in some games at the end of the night and really shakes the game up. For example, sometimes during a ripple, the whole night phase is repeated, so that everyone can perform their action a second time. Ripples can have major unforeseen consequences and lead to crazy games that are best appreciated by experienced One Night players.
So One Night Ultimate Aliens is fun, possibly even the most fun expansion for seasoned veterans. But, we don’t recommend it to beginners. It should probably the third or fourth One Night expansion you get.
- Players: 4 - 10
- Duration: 10 - 15 minutes
- Makes Werewolves easier to play
- Great for beginners
The most important additions in this expansion are the special werewolf characters. In the normal One Night, all werewolves are vanilla werewolves without special abilities. But in Daybreak, the Mystic Wolf can look at another player’s card, and the Alpha Wolf can transform a villager into a werewolf.
Some of the special werewolf characters make the game much easier for the werewolves, in two ways. First, they have an ability that they can use to their advantage. Second, they can leverage their ability to make up a more credible story of why they’re a villager. For example, the Mystic Wolf can claim that she’s the seer.
So, if you find that in your group the werewolves lose more often than they win, Daybreak can help you out. Or if you’re just looking for your first One Night expansion, this is a great pick.
- Players: 3 - 10
- Duration: 10 - 15 minutes
- Great character roles
Some of the bonus roles are staples that we always use in our games. For example, we like The Thing, a villager that can tap a player to the left or right on the back. It’s not a super impactful role, so we like to substitute it for a vanilla villager. This is great because it gives a player an ability without overloading the game with information.
Another role we often play with is the Aura Seer, who gets to know at the end of the night which players saw or moved a card. The Aura Seer is fun because she gets a lot of information, but not necessarily on who’s good and who’s bad (especially if you play with Daybreak in which a lot of baddies get to look at cards too).
Bonus Roles is a simple but solid expansion. To get everything out of it you need all the other expansions too, as some of the bonus roles are Aliens and Vampires, but even if you own only the One Night Base game this expansion is worth it. We definitely recommend getting Bonus Roles to add to your One Night collection.
- Players: 3 - 10
- Duration: 10 - 15 minutes
- Up to 3 teams (werewolves, villagers and vampires)
- Chips add extra hidden identity
Vampire is definitely a fun expansion. But, one thing we don’t like about it is that the identity chips feel tagged on. It sometimes feel like your original character doesn’t really matter anymore because it often gets overruled by your chip. And as a whole it just feels like they took One Night and then added an extra layer of One Night on top of it through the chips, instead of expanding on the original layer in a subtle and interesting way.
That said, we often play One Night Vampire. Once you wrap your head around everyone having a double identity, the game is more challenging than the original One Night, and there’s an extra layer of hidden identities and deception. So we recommend Vampire, but mostly for more experienced players.
- Players: 3 - 10
- Duration: 10 - 15 minutes
- Standalone game
- Deeper strategy through multiple rounds
During the rounds of One Week, you move from one room to the next in a big mansion. In between some rounds, players sometimes switch identity tokens. It’s your job to know at the end of the last round who’s a werewolf and who isn’t.
We really like the concept of One Week, as multiple rounds typically offer the potential for deeper strategies in games. However, One Week significantly increases the amount of rules and set up time compared to One Night. So taking into consideration this trade off, One Week is not bad, but also not great.
- Players: 3 - 7
- Duration: 30 - 45 minutes
Extra: Card Sleeves For One Night Ultimate Werewolf
The thing is that if you buy an expansion, those cards will be brand new and therefore distinguishable from your original set. And if you buy an extra expansion a year from now you’ll have the same problem again.
Now at out house we have the house rule that you don’t look at any identifying clues on the back of the cards, and this works most of the time. However, we’ve had a few bad experiences when we brought the game to a party, where some of the players openly refused to follow this rule, or where suspect that they covertly disobeyed it. And that ruins the game.
And we’ve also had some guests that said they find it hard to shut off the part of their brain that saw the scratch on the back of the card…
Therefore, for your One Night collection we recommend picking up a few card sleeves.
Rounding Up
We hope our ranking helps you find the best One Night Werewolf expansion for you. If our post leaves any of your questions unanswered, just shoot us a message through our contact form.
Have fun with your new One Night Ultimate Werewolf expansion!