The test was a great success. We played 17 games in a couple of hours, both large and small sizes. The game is a blast, even when I was playing only against remote players. (
mrmorse was the only person to show up at HQ, about an hour into it.) There's a lot about playing online over a text-and-graphic interface that's different about playing in person, and it turns out that the differences are fun for their own reasons.
The QA aspect of it went quite well, too. Zarf ended up with a good-sized list of small improvements to pound in tomorrow, and I found myself with some more website bugs to squish.
I want to play more big games of werewolf, and am frustrated that the Volity Network isn't full of people get! Grr! We've gotta change this. (Well, yes.)
Other notes:
* Volity needs chat channels. In Werewolf, if you get killed you're forbidden to speak, and when your only interface to the world is a text chat this makes you completely invisible; kind of a bummer! Several people suggested a "graveyard" channel where the dead could kibitz out of earshot from the squabbling villagers.
* Gamut (not Volity) needs a "sticky-ready" control of some sort, for when you don't care how a game is configured, you just want to play it. When you're in sticky mode, a config change would not unready you. (In reality, the referee would send a "you've been unreadied" message to the player, but Gamut would immediately say "OK I'm ready!" back to the ref and not show anything to the user.)