Last weekend, I played Blood on the Clocktower (BoTC), an in-person social deduction game. This game, created by Steven Medway and published by The Pandemonium Institute, was conceivably designed for large groups of social deduction enthusiasts, but more realistically, people who enjoy arguing, logic, and have way too much time on their hands. Despite generally falling into at least two of those three categories, I often find myself frustrated at the end of social deduction games. After my playthrough, I realized why: while I enjoy the logical deduction of social deduction, I often discount the social element. However, BoTC’s use of uncertain information and private communication mechanic intertwine social dynamics and information gathering in a way that makes success impossible without strongly considering both.
Several of BoTC’s mechanics combine to create a level of uncertainty that allows social reasoning to flourish.
Like many other social deduction games, BoTC’s key objective is to outwit the opposing team by either determining or hiding the identity of the evil players. Similar to Avalon, in BoTC, some players receive information about others, which leads to the dynamic of information gathering to determine each other’s identities. What sets BoTC apart is its uncertainty and complexity. Every player has a role in BoTC but which roles are in play is unknown. While many players receive information, very little of this information is concrete. For example, a player may learn that “at least one of these two players is evil” or have a power to “identify the evil person, but one good player appears evil to you.” Additionally, the role of the “Drunk” means one player may give false information the entire game. Together, these mechanics mean, despite their complex dependencies, multiple contradicting realities could be possible at the same time. This creates a fascinating dynamic where players are forced to rely on social reasoning, such as players’ reactions, to deduce what occurred rather than simply catch the evil team in a lie.
In the game I played, the evil team had crafted a perfect lie around the idea that one player was Drunk which directly contradicted my ongoing theory that relied on their information being false. At the time, I was frustrated: even with all the hidden information revealed, success still felt far away. It was my teammate Preston that made the necessary deduction: “It was suspicious how Malti only revealed her information right after Vivian came under fire.” I had been so distracted in processing the revealed information, I had missed the key social context that provided additional clues. As a player, I tend dislike when social deduction games that are solved through purely social reasoning: such as when a game of Avalon was lost because Mordred “looked suspicious.” However, in BoTC, it feels like social and information-based reasoning are both necessary, rather than one forcibly overtaking the other.
BoTC’s mechanic of sidebarring puts the two forms of reasoning in direct contradiction by creating a way to gather information at the expense of your social credence. During the discussion phase, any player can choose to sidebar: hold a private conversation with any number of players, away from the main conversation. While this a great way to exchange information privately, it comes at a social cost. After sidebarring with Lucas and Preston, players I trusted, I came back to a conversation that had completely shifted in our absence. During our sidebar, the evil players had convinced the group to be suspicious of Lucas. Aside from strategically losing out on time to convince other players, under the premise of the game being a small town trying to oust a demon, the act of leaving the community to have a private chat appears suspicious. Thus, one must decide whether more information is worth the cost of other’s trust.
Ethically, the strategic importance of social dynamics strengthens the boundaries of the magic circle and lessens the moral implications of actions like lying. Within the game, choosing to lie isn’t an moral failure, it’s a strategic play to help you obtain your objective. In fact, maintaining your loyalties can even be a hinderance: during my game, we were suspicious of one good player because they were constantly defending a player we considered to be evil. However, in the end it just turned out they were a really nice friend who had unfortunately misplaced their trust in a suspicious manner.
As a player who tends towards “solving” games through logic, BoTC’s emphasis on social dynamics was frustrating at first. However, its fair treatment of both caused me to reevaluate how I view social deduction games, with the social aspect holding equal weight to the deduction.
