The Chinese Party Game With 198 Million Users That Almost No One Outside China Has Heard Of

A Chinese social-deduction app has quietly amassed 198 million users, 400-plus offline cafes, and a nine-tier ranking ladder that almost no one outside China has ever heard of.

By Carry and Conquer Publications

A voice-chat mobile app built around a Soviet-era parlor game has quietly become one of the most-played social products in Chinese mobile history, and it never crossed the Pacific.

Werewolf Kill, known in Chinese as Langrensha, launched in December 2016 as the first mobile digitization of the Mafia-style social deduction genre in China. It crossed 10 million users within three months, a growth curve fast enough to put it in the App Store's top three social apps behind only WeChat and QQ. Nine years later, its parent company puts cumulative users at 198 million, peak monthly actives at 15 million, and total user online time above 270 billion minutes. It has spun off a national network of more than 400 board-game cafes staffed by trained human moderators, a nine-tier competitive ranking ladder built with esports organizations, licensed reality television, and an annual market of roughly 7 million physical card decks. Almost none of this registers in Western tabletop or gaming press, which has spent years covering Among Us and its imitators as the genre's defining hit while a much larger, much older Chinese cousin operated almost entirely out of view.

From Anonymous Confession App to National Obsession

Werewolf Kill was not its creator's first act. Founder Xu Weifan, a self-described introvert who started building social apps as a university student in Shanghai, spent years cycling through products that never broke out: an anonymous campus confession platform called Jiamian, a voice-hotline app called Orange Hotline, a group-buying service for students. None of it stuck. The company he eventually built, Shanghai Jiamian Information Technology, took its name from that early failed app and kept iterating.

The break came in December 2016, when Jiamian's Werewolf Kill launched alongside a wave of rival apps racing to digitize a board game that had already been building momentum offline for years. The underlying game, itself an adaptation of the Soviet parlor game Mafia, had been popularized in China through televised competitive shows: Zhanqi TV's Lying Man in 2015, Panda TV's Panda Kill (backed by Wang Sicong, son of Dalian Wanda chairman Wang Jianlin), and media personality Ma Dong's celebrity variety show Dinner Party Temptation, which drew millions of viewers to watch famous faces bluff and accuse one another on camera. By the time Jiamian's app arrived, there was already a ready audience trained on the game's rhythms and vocabulary. Within three months, Werewolf Kill had 10 million users. By early 2017, more than 40 competing Werewolf apps had appeared in the Chinese iOS store, backed by venture money from GSR Ventures, Giant Network, Hongtai Fund, and others. One early investor, Zhu Xiaohu, told reporters in mid-2017 that the category would return more than tenfold on capital deployed, projecting roughly 200 million yuan in profit for the year; by year's end he had revised the estimate upward to 300 million yuan.

The Numbers Behind an Invisible Giant

Most of that first wave of competitors did not survive. A crowded field of nearly 100 rival apps that appeared after the 2017 Lunar New Year had largely collapsed by the following autumn, undone by a business model that leaned almost entirely on tipping and virtual props in a game that demanded long, high-attention, voice-chat sessions poorly suited to casual mobile play. Werewolf Kill was one of the few that kept building. Jiamian consolidated the surrounding intellectual property throughout the following years, buying up competing trademarks until it became the sole official rights holder for the Werewolf Kill brand across every format: app, card decks, cafes, tournaments, film and television licensing.

By July 2024, when Jiamian marked its tenth anniversary, the company disclosed that the app had been updated more than 300 times and had accumulated 198 million total users, a peak of 15 million monthly active users, and more than 270 billion cumulative minutes of user time. For context, Among Us, the social deduction title most Western audiences would name if asked to name one, has accumulated somewhere north of 700 million lifetime downloads since 2018, a far larger install base by raw count, spread across a title built for short, replayable rounds rather than the long, voice-driven sessions that define Werewolf Kill. Werewolf Kill's engagement figures point to a different kind of scale: fewer total accounts, but a userbase that stayed inside the app for a genuinely enormous cumulative stretch of time, on a product that most people outside China could not name.

Judges, Cafes, and a Physical Card Economy

Werewolf Kill never fully left the physical world it came from, and that offline half of the business is arguably the more unusual part of the story. In March 2017, a dedicated venue called JYClub opened on Shanghai's Honghui Road, charging 35 yuan an hour and offering something the app itself could not: a professional human moderator, or "judge" (faguan), running the game exactly as the original tabletop version intended. Despite a relatively out-of-the-way location and a price point steep enough to scare off casual visitors, the club drew large crowds on opening night, partly on the strength of appearances by well-known competitive players. Other top players followed the same model, opening their own branded venues off the back of their in-game reputations.

That cafe format has since scaled into a formal national network. By 2024, Jiamian counted partnerships with more than 400 dedicated Werewolf-themed board-game cafes across China, each employing trained judges to run in-person sessions the app cannot fully replicate. Alongside the cafes sits a printed card business that has proven durable enough to justify annual limited editions: Jiamian's official card decks, complete with new character roles and reworked art themes, sell an estimated 7 million copies a year, and the company issues fresh sets on a regular schedule, including a 2021 steampunk-themed release with new characters built specifically for offline play. On top of the cafes and the cards, Jiamian built out a formal competitive structure: a nine-tier ranking system running from amateur to professional, developed in partnership with esports organizations, giving the game a certification ladder more commonly associated with traditional competitive titles than a party game.

The scale of that offline apparatus, as Jiamian itself disclosed at the anniversary event, is easy to understate. The company said it has organized or co-organized more than 800 Werewolf Kill tournaments, maintains partnerships with over 300 university clubs in addition to its cafe network, has licensed three feature films off the IP, and has filed at least 16 lawsuits to defend the trademark against copycats. It also credits the ecosystem with producing more than 2,000 livestreamers who built their following inside the Werewolf Kill world specifically, a talent pipeline that runs in the opposite direction of most mobile games, where streamers typically arrive from elsewhere to cover a title rather than being generated by it.

Building a Billion-Yuan IP Machine

Jiamian's ambitions for Werewolf Kill have moved well past keeping the original app alive. In 2020, the company's registered capital jumped more than eightfold, from roughly 10.8 million yuan to 100 million yuan, coinciding with a strategic investment from Sina Weibo that saw the social media giant take a controlling stake. Several of Jiamian's earlier venture backers exited in that round with what reporting at the time described as solid returns, and Weibo executives, including CEO Wang Gaofei and investment head Liu Yunli, joined the company's board.

Four years later, at its tenth-anniversary celebration on July 30, 2024, Jiamian announced the "Chuangyi Wolf" initiative: a 100-million-yuan cultural and creative fund aimed at building what the company calls a full "Werewolf IP plus X" ecosystem, spanning film, animation, and novel development; variety shows, esports tournaments, and livestreaming; and merchandise, card games, and tabletop products. The company has said it plans to introduce a new competitive ladder mode inside the app, an AI-assisted judge feature to reduce reliance on human moderators for casual games, and a suite of spin-off mini-games built around tower-defense, idle, and strategy mechanics, all under the Werewolf brand. It has also pushed the IP directly onto university campuses: a 2024 fall campus tour ran across 47 cities and 76 universities, and a companion "find a partner" matchmaking event drew more than 2,100 student participants who together played 371 rounds of a two-player variant of the game. Jiamian itself has since expanded beyond Werewolf Kill entirely, opening a Singapore-based overseas headquarters in 2022 and building a broader portfolio that now spans more than 40 apps and a combined 200 million users, including the mobile hit Super Egg-Laying Duck.

Why the West Never Noticed

None of this required Western attention to succeed, and that is precisely what makes it an anomaly. Among Us became a generation-defining cultural moment in English-language media within months of its 2020 breakout, propelled by Twitch and YouTube creators who turned the game into a spectator sport. Werewolf Kill built a comparable, arguably larger, engagement base with none of that crossover visibility: no viral streamer moment, no English-language press cycle, no Western publisher picking up distribution rights. It grew instead through a distinctly Chinese pipeline of celebrity reality television, campus culture, and a physical cafe network that reproduced the in-person judge-run game the app was built to imitate in the first place.

That combination, an app-scale digital audience layered directly onto a thriving offline economy of cafes, judges, and printed cards, has no clean Western analog. Poker has casinos; Magic: The Gathering has game stores; Among Us has neither, because it was never designed to be played in a room with a human moderator calling out roles by hand. Werewolf Kill's operators spent nine years building all three layers at once, and the result is a company now sitting on a 198-million-user IP with enough scale to fund a hundred-million-yuan bet on film, television, and a nationwide tournament circuit, entirely unnoticed by the market that usually claims to track where the next big social game is coming from.