Author

Tim Adler

Publishing date

January 28, 2025

Language

English

Introduction

During my time at university, but especially when we were on retreats with my supervisor’s research group, we really enjoyed playing a certain party game. Some call it Werewolf, others know it as Mafia. It’s a so-called social subversion game, where everyone is assigned a hidden role. To win the game, you generally have to figure out who is who, while keeping your role secret. By now, there are newer games in this genre like Triple Agent, Secret Hitler, or Among Us. If you do not know what I am talking about, it is probably safe to say that this blog post is not for you, because the remainder is about how I reskinned Werewolf for a bunch of scientists. I even went so far as to print some playing cards in an online shop. If you always felt like the “Reviewer 2”s are out to get you and the scientific community should stand together to oust them: This is the game for you 😉 Feel free to play it 😁 If this blog post inspired you or you had a great time playing the game I would love to hear about it! Of course, additional role suggestions are also always welcome.

Below is a rough overview of the game mechanics. However, if you are not familiar with Werewolf it might be too high level. The most important part is the roles table which contains the names and abilities of the reskinned Werewolf roles. After that, you can find a proposal for a play order during the review phase, such that each role gets access to the information they need.

Before we get started, I would like to thank koebi and Merovius for the amazing brainstorming session that led to this game! 🙏🏽

Disclaimer: Please, do not take anything in the following too seriously 😅

Research - The Game!

Welcome to Research - The Game! This game aims to simulate research as minutely as possible. Naturally, everyone knows that it boils down to publishing papers (who cares about experiments?!?).

Goal

The game is played during the review process before a STEM conference. All players are researchers who want to publish their papers at the conference. Of course, if you want to publish you also have to review. Each player is assigned a role at random that belongs to one of two groups: the sincere and honest “Reviewer 1”s and the power-hungry and scheming “Reviewer 2”s. The Reviewer 1s want to keep the integrity of the peer review process and as such want to blacklist all Reviewer 2s, as they exploit flaws in the review process to their advantage. The Reviewer 2s just want to further their agenda by building a syndicate and trying to get as many of their papers accepted as possible. To that end, they try to discredit and reject as many Reviewer 1 papers as possible.

How Reviewer 1s can try to remove Reviewer 2s and vice versa is explained in the following sections. Some roles have special powers that can help in identifying Reviewer 1s and 2s. Some of those roles also alter the winning conditions (if you are new to the game, I would suggest leaving these roles out until you feel comfortable with the base rules).

Setup

1. Look at the available roles and, as a group, decide which ones you would like to use.
1. If you only play roles without special characters, as a rule of thumb, you should have 2 Reviewer 2s for 8-9 players and 3 for 10-12 players.
2. The more special Reviewer 1 roles you include the more Reviewer 2s you can add.
2. Choose an "Almighty General Chair" (narrator). This person shuffles the role cards and hands one face down to each of the other players. The narrator leads through the different phases of the game but is not part of any of the group discussions and cannot be voted out.
3. Each player ensures that they and only they can see their role and learn about their review style (Reviewer 1 or Reviewer 2) and abilities (if any).

Playing the game

1. The game starts with a submission phase, where the players elect one of their members to be on the Steering Committee. This person is the tiebreaker in votes. From then on the Steering Committee membership becomes hereditary.
2. The following phases occur until a winning condition (see next section) is met.
1. Review phase: All players close their eyes. The Almighty General Chair will narrate through the night and indicate the roles to act and use their abilities. In general, the Reviewer 2 Syndicate will have rejected a manuscript at the end of the review phase. The corresponding player is out of the game.
2. Rebuttal phase: All players discuss the merit of each other as a reviewer. In the end, they plea to the Almighty General Chair to remove one reviewer by voting. The chosen player is out of the game. They reveal (verbally) whether they were a Reviewer 1 or a Reviewer 2 (never their exact role).

Winning conditions

1. If at any point there is no Reviewer 2 left in the game: All Reviewer 1s win.
2. If at any point there is no Reviewer 1 left in the game: All Reviewer 2s win.
3. If there is an Equal Opportunity Commissioner and the Dual Career Couple belong to opposite factions and if at any point they are the only players left in the game: They win.
4. If there is an Idealistic / Disillusioned PhD Student whose manuscript was rejected during the review phase and who was voted out during the rebuttal phase: The Idealistic / Disillusioned PhD Student wins by themself.

Conditions 1 and 2 can sometimes be relaxed. For example, the Reviewer 2s know each other and as such can vote out all other players as soon as they have an absolute majority.

Golden Rules

1. The Almighty General Chair is always right. This rule is mostly there to keep the integrity of the game. E.g., the Almighty General Chair might (erroneously) skip the IT Admin during the review phase. If the IT Admin voices this problem, they would most likely be removed from the game in the following review phase.
2. Never show your role card to anyone! Just don't do it 😉 You can claim whatever you want during discussions. You can memorize the card text and cite it by heart, but even when you leave the game: Don't show the card!
• As an extension to this rule, I would add: Also never read your card’s text aloud.

Roles

* I’m pretty sure these roles were made up by my friends.

Review Phase Timeline

During the first review phase, the Almighty General Chair should wake up each role and note down the player's name. The following is a suggested order of the roles to act to keep the state of the game consistent

1. Area Chair*
2. Pre-evaluation tenure track PostDoc*
3. Equal Opportunity Commissioner*
4. Dual Career Couple*
5. Intern*/**
6. Sneaky Co-Author
7. Reviewer 2 Syndicate
8. IT-Admin
9. Program Chair
10. Idealistic / Disillusioned PhD Student

* These should only open their eyes during the first review phase

** is allowed to open their eyes whenever they want

Conclusion

I hope the explanations above are understandable. If not, let me know and I will try to update the post accordingly 😉 I had a great time playing this version with my colleagues and I hope, you will have an even better time! As mentioned before, if you come up with your own roles, I would love to hear about them. I would be happy to extend the role table. Naturally, I would cite you, after all, this game is about good scientific practice 😁