18th of April 2025
Blood on the Clocktower is a brilliant game. For those who have never played it, I HIGHLY recommend that you do. Even if you are someone that doesn’t normally enjoy social deduction games, I still believe that Blood on the Clocktower offers something new that may improve on issues that you have with other social deduction games. This is because of the brilliant work of the creator in iterating on previous social deduction games – making small incremental improvements that build to make a much greater game.
The OG social deduction game is Werewolf (also known as mafia). In its purest, simplest form, the game takes a team of “villagers” who are trying to seek out and get rid of the hidden “werewolves” in their midst each day, without having any knowledge of who the werewolves are. The werewolves collectively kill a “villager” each night. While a brilliant idea, Werewolf is not without its issues. The original game has players eliminated on death, which in a large player count can result in people unable to play for hours at a time and with nothing better to do. Similarly, in the barest bones basic version of the game, players are purely operating on “vibes”, with no concrete information to work off of other than who died each night. Future developments and spinoffs have worked to improve on these aspects of Werewolf.
As the game developed, new roles were introduced with powers such as the ability to check a player and examine their alignment or protect a player from the werewolves at night. These gave the players more powers and abilities to deduce who the werewolves could be, and some werewolf powers were also introduced to make this more difficult. Introducing these powers created more variability for the game. Similarly, they introduced increased player agency in that they could choose how to use their abilities or choose to lie about which abilities they have. Both of which I believe improve the base game significantly.
Werewolf has also had several spinoffs which are either reskins of the original game or innovate on the mechanics in some way. One example, One Night Ultimate Werewolf operates over a single “night”. This eliminates the need for a storyteller, but more importantly it prevents eliminated players from having to wait around for the game to end. However, it is still imperfect, with some messy interactions that can lead to imperfect game states – in particular this game can lead to “lie stand offs” where one player has lied in order to try to elicit information from others, but they are not getting the information they seek, causing them to withhold the truth for a significant period of time, only to reveal it just before voting begins. This can lead to some extremely messy scenarios, especially if multiple players are doing this simultaneously.
Secret Hitler is not a play on werewolf, but it is a significant innovation in social deduction gameplay. Secret Hitler pares back the roles and much of the mess of previous werewolf games to introduce a bureaucratic system of gameplay which excels in creating small but significant information systems and ratcheting up the tension significantly as the game goes on. Although the tension increases naturally in a game of werewolf due to the decreasing player count, Secret Hitler forces the intention to increase, where each vote gives the current “government” greater and greater powers as the game goes on. This makes the “election” increasingly important every single time and exponentially increases the tension. I played secret Hitler for several years and loved it, but my love for it has waned as time has gone on. Although the systems and tension it creates are excellent, it is prone to significant “statistical analysis” and what I would consider “loud” players. Experienced players come to know the “policy” deck well and often make arguments based on the odds of cards coming up or not. Similarly, “loud” players will often yell or argue their viewpoint over the top of others – this is in part an issue of not having an overseeing storyteller, and in part an issue of a game with a large amount of “true” information.
Then we get to Blood on the Clocktower. Blood on the Clocktower simultaneously solves the elimination issue, the roles and player agency issues, and the “true” information issues all with simple changes. Eliminated players can still talk and interact with others. They even still get to vote – admittedly, they only get one vote for the rest of the game compared to the living players who can vote as much as they like. However, this vote is all the more relevant. Because the ghost only gets one vote, when they choose to use it is highly important and a major marker for the living players to watch for. In addition, because ghosts tend to hold their votes, it means the final couple of votes at the end of the game are often significantly influenced by the large majority of ghosts and what they decide. Blood on the Clocktower also has many roles which give players agency. There’s too many and too much to go into detail here, but many roles come across directly from werewolf, but others interact in more subtle and unexpected ways, such as the fisherman who directly asks the storyteller for some advice to help them win. Finally, and in my opinion the biggest innovation that Blood on the Clocktower offers, Blood on the Clocktower solves the “true” information/”loud player” issue by reinforcing that even as a good player you will not always receive perfectly true information. A good player could secretly be drunk (they receive false information throughout the game) or poisoned by an evil player (causing them to temporarily receive false information). This means that a player can’t ever be 100% certain that they have perfect information and have solved the game. In combination with a storyteller which has control over the room, this prevents “loud” players from insisting that they’re correct and that everyone should listen to them.
These systems are brilliant and the way that they can combine and interact with smaller mechanics that are part of the core gameplay of Blood on the Clocktower create what in my opinion is the perfect social deduction game.
