I loved the social deduction game Werewolf in high school. On various school or club trips, I would try to get other people to play it in our free time. My interest in Werewolf began to taper off in college and disappeared when I discovered One Night Ultimate Werewolf (ONUW). I’ve tried numerous social deduction games – Two Rooms and a Boom, Secret Hitler, Coup, etc. – but none came close to dethroning ONUW.
The biggest reason I liked ONUW is that even good-aligned players have incentives to lie. Since your team can change without your knowledge, part of the game involves figuring out your team, and if you always tell the truth, you may find yourself without an alibi when the Troublemaker reveals that they swapped you.
Another reason I liked ONUW is how short the games are. A game of Werewolf feels heavy, while ONUW feels light-hearted. Because each game is such a small time investment, you can try all sorts of silly strategies without worrying that you will spoil the experience of other players. If you try a crazy gambit in Werewolf and it doesn’t work out, your team may feel like you are wasting their time.
Of course, the elephant in the room is player elimination, which is a weakness of Werewolf and noticeably absent from ONUW. Sitting around to watch because you are dead is often not much fun. The penalty of dying also skews incentives by making players less willing to die for the good of their team, which limits the sort of strategies they will try.
Recently, I encountered Blood on the Clocktower (BotC) by watching Let’s Play videos on the No Rolls Barred Youtube channel, which was recommended to me by a friend. It is very entertaining to watch, and I was curious to see how it would play. Mechanically, it is a lot like Werewolf but with a few twists that make a big difference.
The most visible change is that dead players still participate in conversations and get a “ghost vote” that they can use once per game. Dead players usually save this vote until the last day of the game, where it comes down to choosing between the “final three” players alive. One problem this solves is giving living good players a way to win even when outnumbered.
A more innovative change is the storyteller’s role in the game. In most Werewolf variants, the moderator resolves night actions mindlessly. You could replace them with a machine and see no difference in the game. In BotC, the storyteller chooses what information to give players and has the explicit agenda of providing a balanced game (which in practice means making sure the game reaches the final three players).
The game has numerous other clever ideas, such as madness and its notion of scripts, but dead votes and the storyteller’s role are the most defining features. After watching lots of games of BotC on Youtube, I decided to try it out myself. I joined the unofficial discord channel, learned the ropes, and played three games.
In my first game, I was the Butler, a good-aligned character that must choose a master and can only vote when their master does. It was a relaxing role because it simplified things a lot; I didn’t have to think too hard about who to vote for and could focus on trying to solve the puzzle that the game presents.
In my second game, I was the Godfather, an evil-aligned character that knows which “outsiders” are in play (outsiders are good characters with harmful abilities) and gets to kill whenever one dies. I had a lot of fun with that role and ended up winning.
My third game made me the demon (the evil character the good team needs to kill to win) and was a bit of a train wreck. My team lost early on, but the game dragged on due to the Good team’s paranoia. Playing as the demon was nerve-wracking in a mildly unpleasant way, and it made me feel bad because it felt like my misplays were responsible for my team’s loss.
I have mixed feelings about BotC. What I enjoy most about social deduction games is the feeling of solving a puzzle when not all of the information you have is reliable, and BotC delivers on that. However, the night phase can drag on a bit, and the game length overall is a bit much. The one thing that BotC does brilliantly is to make the storyteller role fun rather than rote. It is so popular that the Discord server I played on has implemented queues for people wanting to story-tell.
Compared to its most immediate competition in the sub-genre of social deduction games where people die, BotC is the best game I have played, and I will happily play it when given the opportunity. However, ONUW is still my favorite social deduction game overall. Both ONUW and BotC beat out the competition by providing logical puzzles to solve rather than just relying on social cues.
The one shared element of ONUW and BotC that I dislike is how long the night phase takes. It is more tolerable in ONUW because it only happens once, but it is still something I wish could be shortened. As a game designer, this suggests unexplored design space in finding ways to eliminate the night phase while preserving role-based information.