Smosh Games puts its spin on ‘The Traitors’ in two supersized ‘Werewolf’ episodes

When Smosh Games plays the social deduction game Werewolf, or variations on it, the vibes are of cousins gathering in a basement during a family holiday party. A herd of the comedy channel’s cast members squeezes onto one massive couch, which quickly becomes a war zone as a team of “villagers” must suss out the “werewolves” among them. Accusations fly, alliances crumble, and general chaos abounds.

This November, though, Smosh Games levels up its Werewolf videos in a big way, with two supersized Werewolf in Real Life episodes. Each installment throws cast members Courtney Miller, Amanda Lehan-Canto, Tommy Bowe, Chanse McCrary, Angela Giarratana, Guchi, Courtney Theophin, and Eli Gonzalez into a mansion for a larger-than-life game of Werewolf, hosted by fellow cast member Shayne Topp. It’s basically Smosh meets The Traitors, and it’s certainly the channel’s most ambitious project since 2025’s Smosh Summer Games, which spanned across every Smosh YouTube channel.

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Other gaming channels, such as Good Time Society and No Rolls Barred, have pulled off similar large-scale projects based on social deduction game Blood on the Clocktower. In 2020, Smosh Games even put out Among Us in Real Life, a video that feels like Werewolf in Real Life‘s progenitor. But while that video clocks in at 17 minutes long and takes place on Smosh’s real-life set, Werewolf in Real Life goes bigger, with episodes ranging from an hour to an hour and a half long, as well as elaborate sets and costumes.

For Smosh Games Channel Director Spencer Agnew, a project of this magnitude seemed daunting at first.

“I don’t think I felt ready to do something like this,” Agnew told Mashable in a video call.

Agnew credits the 2025 arrival of Smosh Games producer Anders Norberg, who also co-directed Werewolf in Real Life with Agnew, for helping push him and the team to believe in a project of this scale. Norberg’s background includes working on reality TV series like Survivor and Big Brother, so his experience proved vital for Werewolf in Real Life.

The reality TV influence shines through in Werewolf in Real Life‘s cast confessionals, a narrative tool Smosh also employed in the return of Smosh Summer Games. However, the main focus remains the gameplay, which combines the standard roles of One Night Ultimate Werewolf with the deliberations and side conversations of Blood on the Clocktower. (Players do vote each other out, Traitors-style, at dramatic roundtables.)

“The biggest thing that we had for this was, I wanted to preserve the structure and momentum of a normal game of Werewolf or Blood on the Clocktower, which was always going to be really hard when shooting on location,” Agnew said.

Agnew and the Smosh Games crew had to ensure that the cast maintained a sense of urgency and Werewolf-style paranoia throughout the shoot. Unlike The Traitors, where cameras are running throughout the castle, Werewolf in Real Life could only film in one room at a time, meaning the cast had to take breaks from the game while the crew reset for the next shots. Yet the transitions between scenes feel seamless.

A large part of that comes down to the immersion of the environment, which cast members said helped them lock into the game.

“Being in a massive haunted mansion, if you will, and being in full costume — and the thing is, not costumes, those were legit Irish wool sweaters, a Greek fisherman cap — it just immediately raised the stakes for me,” Lehan-Canto told Mashable in a joint video interview with Bowe. “I was like, ‘It’s Werewolf. Someone is gonna die tonight.'”

“When you’re in your comfy sweater and you’re sitting on a couch ass to ass with everyone and you’re looking at a card, there’s less energy around it. It’s more casual,” Bowe added. “[With Werewolf in Real Life,] your call time is early, you’re getting into a full outfit, and you’re playing Werewolf, and Shayne looks like a Christmas tree made out of special fabrics. It made it so intense that in the second episode, Chanse will not let me have a one-on-one conversation because he’s just truly giddy about talking to people.”

The cast of Smosh in “Werewolf in Real Life.”
Credit: Smosh

The costumes, designed by costume designer Mila Hermanovski, were inspired by the villagers in Resident Evil Village at Agnew’s request, while the set, helmed by production designer Andrew Lau, ushers in a deliciously spooky atmosphere.

“To me, the costumes and the set really helped everyone come to life, and it gives them so much more comedic fodder,” Agnew said. “That’s my favorite thing to do, is to set cast up with a playground that they can play in, and props to play with, and costumes to inhabit, and characters to figure out, and it makes my job the easiest, most fun job in the world.”

While the first episode presents a fairly standard game of Werewolf, with just two Werewolves and a Seer, the second episode, out Nov. 8, promises to take things further. This time around, the game incorporates roles like the Hunter, who gets to kill someone if they’re killed; the Bodyguard, who has the ability to protect someone during the night phase; and the Cupid, who chooses two players to be Lovers, whose fates are bound to one another.

“The people that Cupid picked feels like a produced moment, but it was genuinely off the cuff, and it leads to the funniest moments ever,” Agnew teased.

Even as Werewolf in Real Life kicks it up a notch from episode to episode, Agnew and Norberg are already cooking up what new installments of this level of immersive gameplay could look like for Smosh’s future. At some point, Agnew would love to incorporate the Tanner role, whose main objective is to get killed by the villagers, and who has led to several twisty moments in Smosh Games’ usual Werewolf fare.

Elsewhere, Agnew and Norberg are looking at reskinning the game to fit into different eras. Hermanovski suggested a ’70s-era Studio 54 moment, while Agnew is also intrigued by a late ’60s, early ’70s Scooby Doo-inspired look.

Whatever the future of the game looks like, the priority for Agnew remains authentic cast reactions, as well as a limited level of producer-manufactured drama.

“I feel like we could play the exact same roles we did in the last one, and it would be just as fun and funny, because they’re just an incredible cast,” Agnew said.

The first episode of Werewolf in Real Life is now on YouTube. The second premieres Nov. 8 on the Smosh Games channel.