Ran 4,672 blind Werewolf games with LLMs. One name stands out

I built a little experiment: LLM agents play blind one-night Werewolf against each other. Then I ran 4,672 matches across OpenAI models (GPT-4o-mini, GPT-5-mini) and xAI models (Grok-3-fast, Grok-4-1-fast).

One name gets nuked across the board: Viktor.

“Viktor” (male, Eastern European) is the most-eliminated name in GPT-4o-mini (73.7%), GPT-5-mini (79.1%), and in the combined runs (71.1%). Ivan, Pavel, Mehmet, and Bohdan aren’t far behind. Across every model, male names — especially from Eastern Europe, LatAm, and the Middle East — get picked more often.

On the flip side, names like Olga, Irina, Priya, and Eunji barely ever get voted out in this setup.

What makes this interesting: the game variant removes almost all information. It’s 7 players, 1 wolf, no seer/doctor, one short discussion (~150 chars each), then a simultaneous vote. There’s no signal to reason over. The only visible difference between players is their name — and the models behave as if names carry meaning.

When you aggregate votes by group, the pattern holds across models: male names are over-targeted, female names under-targeted. It’s not one model being weird — it’s consistent behavior.

Important caveats before anyone jumps to conclusions: this shows outcome differences, not root causes. I can’t pin this on training data vs RLHF vs tokenization vs name frequency vs random quirks. The ethnic buckets are broad, some names only appear a few dozen times, and while list position is randomized, it isn’t independently controlled. This is a “something is happening here” result, not a clean causal claim.

Setup details: 140 names across 7 broad categories, balanced 70/70 by gender. Three layers of randomization per game. Parallel async voting. If votes were uniform, you’d expect ~14.3% elimination. The combined z-score is 61.3, which is… not subtle.

If you’re curious, I put the interactive dashboard and full logs up so people can poke holes in it themselves. Try your own name and see how it fares.