Turbos, Vanillas, and Mishmashes, Oh My

-- Thanks to soah for writing this section

Werewolf games are divided into several categories based on their speed and what types of roles are present.

Turbos: The defining characteristic of a turbo is its speed. Each day of a turbo typically lasts between 20 to 30 minutes, with 20 minutes being most common as of March 2009. Nights tend to last 5-10 minutes. Most turbos start spontaneously when there is sufficient interest in playing one. If you are interested in playing, look for a current signup thread. If the latest signup has no posts in the past hour, it is almost certainly dead, in which case a new one should be started. Before creating a signup, you should check the bottom of the forum page to see how many registered users are browsing. It takes at least 9 players to play, so more people than that need to be browsing in order for a turbo to have any chance of happening. If you can no longer play a game that you are signed up for, it is your responsibility to sign out.

Turbos can run with any odd number of players between 9 to 17. There are 2 werewolves with 9 or 11 players, 3 with 13 or 15 players, and 4 with 17 players. There is 1 seer regardless of the number of players. With 11 or 15 players, the seer does not receive a peek on night 0, and for this reason, 11 and 15 player games are not as popular. The seer receives a night 0 peek in the other setups. With 9 players, the seer is given a random villager peek on night 0, but in the larger games he is allowed to make his own selection on night 0 (or the mod may give a random peek from the entire player pool if there isn't time to wait to hear from the seer). 9 player turbos are by far the most common. Special formats for 5 or 7 players are also available, but are generally not played.

Some turbos will have a volunteer to mod the game. In other cases, someone known as a rander (for the Excel function rand()), will assign roles and start the game, and whoever is lynched on day 1 will take over. When this happens, the players are responsible for taking note of when night will be, and stopping posting at that time. This scenario is one of the rare exceptions where players may post at night, because someone needs to post the final vote count. Any posts other than to establish who was lynched are still forbidden. Once the results are established, the dead player should announce his role and take over the mod duties. The wolves need to inform this player not only of who they intend to kill, but also of all of their identities, so that the mod can give the seer his results. Also, the seer needs to contact the mod even if he is sure he is getting killed, because when he dies the mod needs to be sure he is posting the correct role in the writeup.

Some mods and randers will only contact the wolves and seer. If you do not receive any message prior to the start of the game, you are a villager.

Due to the frequency of turbos without mods on day 1 and the amount of frivolous votes being cast, it has become somewhat standard that day 1 of a turbo will not end early due to a voting majority. When in doubt, ask the mod for clarification.

Long Games: Long games are the counterpart to turbos. Long games tend to have 20-30 players and follow a much more rigid structure than turbos. Games have fixed start dates with signup threads usually posted at least a week in advance. The most common setup for a long game is to begin on Monday with day and night cycles which closely follow the days and nights in the United States, although alternate schedules also exist. Saturday and Sunday are almost always combined into a single game day. Long Games typically fall into one of two categories: Vanilla Games (formerly known as Average Speed Games) are traditional games with only the basic roles. Games with more exotic roles used to be called Theme Games, but recently have been called Mish-Mash Games as well.

Vanilla Games: This refers to long games which do not have any special roles. Your typical Vanilla Game will have 20-25% of the players as wolves, and 2 seers. These games used to sometimes feature an Angel, although this role has fallen out of favor on POG and is now grouped with other exotic roles. Night will fall early if majority is reached in most of these games. These games usually have one lynch per day, but sometimes there are "Slow Games" which have fewer players and only three lynches per week.

Vanilla+ and Mishmash: These are games which have non-standard roles. In most cases, they follow a theme from a popular work of fiction, and the roles in the game are named after its characters and they receive powers which are intended to reflect that person's abilities. Some themed games are only a little bit different than vanilla games (for example, a seer, an angel, and a vigilante) while others include multiple evil factions or neutral factions, subplots, and unique game events. And of course, many games fall in between the two extremes. In many of these games, day does not end immediately at majority due to the presence of roles with special voting bonuses.