I played Blood on the Clock Tower, created by Steven Medway for audiences aged 14+. The game can be played online using the Blood on the Clocktower Town Square platform or in-person, as we did. It offers a more complex version of the Mafia-style gameplay, with elaborate roles, participation from dead players, and input from an omniscient narrator or “storyteller.”
Clocktower has a greater narrative embedded by the game designers, as well as a more detailed story woven by the narrator. The 5+ players of this game are each grouped into an “evil” team, with a Demon and Minion working together against the “good” team consisting of Townsfolk and Outsiders. At the start of a game, each player takes on a specific role and ability. The game can be played with different scripts that change the players’ roles, but there are generally three categories of roles: informational, disruptive, and evil. The informational roles learn pieces of information that they can use to try to catch the evil team, the disruptive roles make it so that some information can’t be trusted. Evil roles generally hurt the good team directly in some way (people can’t receive good information, an extra person dies, etc).
The procedures of gameplay involves day and night cycles. The game begins at night, when the Demon and minion learn who each other is and the three roles they can bluff as, and townsfolk begin learning their information. In the day, the townsfolk can talk to each other publicly or privately to try and discern who the evil players are. The day ends when a player is executed, or everyone decides to go to sleep, and on the second night, the Demon starts choosing a player to kill.
Blood on the Clocktower thrives on the perceived challenge. Each respective team must participate in conversation to figure out the evil players or lie to others because it will help their team overcome the other. This creates an atmosphere of suspense, with high engagement from all players, because it is crucial to uncovering the evil team. A key mechanic in Blood on the Clocktower that differentiates it from other popular social deduction games is that people can talk after they are killed. This mechanic means that the evil team has to work harder than in a game of Mafia to ensure they do not reveal themselves too early, and they have to weave a web of lies that consistently keeps them out of suspicion. This feature encourages the demon and minion team to devise creative ways to steer suspicion away from their team that are bad in the short run but can keep them safe in the long run. For example, in the game we played, the Demon kept choosing a dead person to kill, so it looked like no deaths happened in the night. While this slows the win of the evil team, it also makes the good team think that there was a particular demon role in play, which changes how we approach finding them out and ultimately led to the loss of the good team.
The rules of Clocktower outline that players have access to the character sheet for the game, and the Storyteller can choose which roles from the sheet may or may not be in play. This allows for greater possible explanations for certain things happening, which means many players have to operate on information that they know could be false. The inclusion of disruptive roles also adds to the misinformation aspect of this game. With roles like the Recluse, for example, people may believe that a good person is evil, which will cause them to execute incorrectly. Even when there is no recluse, the idea that there could be one makes the game more interesting as it makes it challenging to execute the Minion and Demon correctly.
In this environment of misinformation, there is always friendly-fire chaos and finger-pointing, as the good team cannot fully trust anyone. While the good team is meant to work as a whole, this situation lends itself to the dynamic of mini-alliances, where 2-3 people decide to trust each other and try to deduce who else is evil. The evil team is able to use this dynamic to their advantage by creating alliances with people early on to avoid suspicion.
Of course, Clocktower also involves the element of fantasy. The evil team essentially serves as undercover spies trying to get rid of all of the townsfolk while remaining undiscovered, which brings a sense of thrill they wouldn’t get to experience otherwise, which adds to the game’s ability for escapism. The game ends when the Demon is killed, giving them a greater sense of importance and opportunity to use deceit with no consequence when interacting with other players.
Reflections:
Overall, Blood on the Clocktower is a very thoughtfully designed game. From the after-death participation mechanics to the varied roles and tailored character sheets, there is always room for players and storytellers to craft their own narratives to explain their unique understanding of the game world from their character’s perspective. These dynamics allow for many different misunderstandings and conflicts between and within teams to arise, which differentiates Clocktower from many other social deduction games. For example, oftentimes in Mafia, when a person is killed, it is because they are too close to discovering who the Mafia is. In Clocktower, the demons do not have the luxury of silence from those they kill, and any missteps or slip-ups in their lying will end in their own execution.
Despite these positive aspects of the game, there are still areas where gameplay could be improved. From the beginning of play, many players were confused about their roles and what possible relationships they have with other characters. While this is likely solved after practice and more rounds of playing, it makes playing with beginners difficult and hard to get started. Part of the reason for this is because roles are randomly distributed, so beginners who get complex roles have trouble utilizing them, which leads to the evil team either winning very easily or a beginner player acting as the Demon being found out very quickly. Seeing this, the gameplay may be improved by giving the Storyteller more power to choose roles for players. While it is still essential to keep some element of randomness so there are no patterns for who plays which character, it may be better to have suggested guidelines for a beginner player to get an experienced player as their minion or always have an experienced player on the good team to help player’s get used to the depth of the game without significantly changing the experience. These changes not only help with balance but also enhance the depth of the game by adding new variables that players can take into account as they discern evil from good.
