Roles in VampireVote

VampireVote has four roles: Villager, Vampire, Doctor and Seer. The Doctor and the Seer are optional and the host can switch them on or off. Here is what each role does and how to play it.

Villager

Team: Village. Goal: find the vampires and vote them out.

Villagers have no special power; their power is observation and their vote. It is the most common role in bigger games, and the village’s shared decisions usually decide the game. In online mode villagers do tasks, and finishing all of them wins the game for the village.

Tip: keep track of who walks with whom and how people vote. Inconsistency is a vampire’s biggest weakness.

Vampire

Team: Vampires. Goal: reach equal numbers with the villagers.

Vampires know each other from the start. Each night they bite a villager; online, a vampire has to be next to the victim and the bite has a cooldown. Vampires see further in the dark than villagers. During the day they have to act like innocent villagers.

Tip: wander around as if you were doing tasks, but stay away from light tasks: when a vampire touches the lamp, it doesn’t light.

Doctor

Team: Village. Power: protects one player from a bite each night.

If the vampires choose the protected player, nobody dies that night. In person the Doctor can’t protect the same player two nights in a row. Online, the Doctor has to walk up to the player they want to protect, once per night.

Tip: revealing yourself as the Doctor makes you a target. If the Seer has come out, protecting them is often the best move.

Seer

Team: Village. Power: learns whether one player is a vampire each night.

Online, the Seer has to walk up to the player they want to check. The Seer holds the village’s most valuable information, which makes them the vampires’ number one target.

Tip: collect information first. Speak up when you have found a vampire or the vote is critical; come out too early and you may be bitten the next night.

How many vampires?

On the automatic setting there is roughly one vampire for every four players: 1 vampire for 4–7 players, 2 for 8–11, 3 for 12–15, 4 for 16–19 and 5 for 20. The host can change this by hand, but at the start there are always fewer vampires than villagers.

The infection rule

With this optional rule on, a bitten player doesn’t die: they turn into a vampire and join the vampire team. The person you trusted yesterday may be a vampire today, so games get faster and much more paranoid.

Reveal roles when voted out?

The host decides. If roles are revealed, the village learns something from every vote and games resolve faster. If they stay hidden, vampires can hide more easily and debates last longer.

Other werewolf roles

Tabletop groups often add extra roles: the Hunter who takes someone down with them, the Jester who wins alone by getting voted out, the Lovers who die together, or the Mayor whose vote counts twice. These aren’t in VampireVote yet; new roles are on our roadmap.