I had an idea for an online game similar to the party game Mafia/Werewolf. The party game features an informed minority which is fighting an uninformed majority. For example, every werewolf can tell who are werewolves, but the townspeople can't. So it's about the psychological fight for the uninformed townspeople to weed out the enemy in their midst before they are picked off one by one at night.

The twist would be a mechanism to change a player's alignment. For example, the "evil" group may turn a good player evil by means of a complex spell that requires ingredients, access to the good player's personal items, etc. Obviously this would be risky.

Possibly a similar mechanism would exist for turning bad characters good, e.g. an exorcism, which is more forceful than sneaky. If players can change alignment back to good, a fully informed minority would be a huge problem. So maybe they just start knowing who turned them and it's up to the players to decide how far to spread the information. Or they have a detection method for each other which is not 100% guaranteed.

Another possibility is that evil characters can run away and disguise themselves if they are discovered, however they would lose any property they can't carry with them.

The important thing is that the evil side can't take out the good guys in a fair fight, e.g. they are only 5-10% of the population at the beginning.

Any thoughts on the following would be appreciated:
- What audience might be interested?
- Are there any fatal flaws which make the idea horribly unbalanced?

It reminds me somewhat of spy party by chris hecker.

Any thoughts on the following would be appreciated:
- What audience might be interested?
- Are there any fatal flaws which make the idea horribly unbalanced?

This is just too early to tell, you need more meat on your design. I.e. capture the flag as game concept could be put in a modern warface fps game, a medieval rts game or some arcade casual game, each refering an other target audience and struggling with other balancinge issues.

Try to come up with some more game around the basic concept, maybe some mock-up screens or a simple prototype. Is it a FPS game, a webgame, a roguelike ?

Hmmm...

Make it so that the werewolves will only meet each other when theyre both werewolves, thus not being able to recognize each other while theyre in human mode.

Like in full moon everyone will turn into werewolves, but so that they all do it separately. The only way to know who is a werewolf is to somehow try to find a person while both of you are werewolves, but that requires time as you might just didnt find him.

If you want to communicate in human mode, it needs to be done sneakily by leaving messages and stuff, so that you cannot know who left it (Maybe you could recognize the persons wolf-identity, but not the human-identity)

I had an idea for an online game similar to the party game Mafia/Werewolf. The party game features an informed minority which is fighting an uninformed majority. For example, every werewolf can tell who are werewolves, but the townspeople can't. So it's about the psychological fight for the uninformed townspeople to weed out the enemy in their midst before they are picked off one by one at night.

The twist would be a mechanism to change a player's alignment. For example, the "evil" group may turn a good player evil by means of a complex spell that requires ingredients, access to the good player's personal items, etc. Obviously this would be risky.

Possibly a similar mechanism would exist for turning bad characters good, e.g. an exorcism, which is more forceful than sneaky. If players can change alignment back to good, a fully informed minority would be a huge problem. So maybe they just start knowing who turned them and it's up to the players to decide how far to spread the information. Or they have a detection method for each other which is not 100% guaranteed.

Another possibility is that evil characters can run away and disguise themselves if they are discovered, however they would lose any property they can't carry with them.

The important thing is that the evil side can't take out the good guys in a fair fight, e.g. they are only 5-10% of the population at the beginning.

Any thoughts on the following would be appreciated:
- What audience might be interested?
- Are there any fatal flaws which make the idea horribly unbalanced?

Most people just modify mafia or werewofl rules. It sounds like you are having an idea that was already thought of and implemented in every possible way. People play mafia and werewolf in thousands of variations in both graphical lobbies and forum text formats.

To clarify, I thought of the idea independently, did a bit of research before posting, and mentioned mafia/werewolf because it was the closest thing that people might recognise. I'm sure there are many variations, but I doubt every worthwhile game that has similarities with mafia has been written. Whether this is one... who knows. There's no meat on the bones yet.