Blood on the Clocktower Review

The town storyteller has been found dead in this twist on social deduction games. Use your powers to root out the identity of the demon or hide your villainy. Even if your character dies you can still talk and retain one last vote as a ghost.

Yesterday was my first time playing Blood on the Clocktower, all four times as the game’s storyteller. This party game works similar to Werewolf or Mafia. In those two games there are alternating day and night turns: a small evil team secretly chooses a player’s characters to die at night, and during the day all the players vote to execute a player’s character they think is on the evil team.

Turning to Blood on the Clocktower specifically, the good team must kill the demon that leads the evil team to win. As in many of these games each player has a hidden role, in addition to being good or evil, that may grant helpful powers or unhelpful abilities.For example, the Empath knows the number of adjacent evil characters, while the Drunk’s player believes they have a different role but is in actuality powerless and being passed misinformation.

The storyteller is like a gamemaster in RPGs and is a key differentiator for Blood on the Clocktower from other social deduction games. They are empowered to shape the scenario to maximize in-character drama and out of character fun. So for example, the aforementioned Drunk player might have drawn the token for the Inspector and believe they know one of two players has the role of a specific evil minion. But the Storyteller is operating with full information and instead points to two innocent players chosen to seed an interesting conflict.

Another key change to the game is that players with dead characters retain the ability to speak in the game and hold a single last vote they can cast from beyond the grave. I think this is a pretty good fix to the classic problem of player elimination, because saving your vote for a pivotal decision could turn the tide and win the day for good or evil.

We played four games. The first two had 11-12 players and ended in climatic last days before team evil clinched the victory by reducing the number of living characters to two. The third and fourth games had 8 players and both had victories by the good side, once with a clever deduction by the Slayer who used a once per game ability to eliminate the demon and then once with good taking a fairly early lead and rolling on to victory. There was also some first day weirdness. I made a few rule mistakes with thankfully minor consequences as well as a few judgments that I regret because, while they complied with the rules, they were not the most fun choices.

On the balance, the game lived up to the hype for me. My mistakes aside, most people had fun, and I greatly preferred it to other social deduction games I’ve played. Being the storyteller was a different experience than playing, but came with the delightful dramatic irony of knowing who is lying and the being able to partially see through their tactics. The game also provides a fair amount of guidance on how the storyteller should use both the rules and social engineering to increase the odds that a good time will be had by all and avoid the bullying or other unpleasant manipulative tactics that social deduction games can inadvertently encourage. I specifically liked the traveler roles, which can be added for a late arriving player or be given to a player that may need to leave early without disrupting the game.

My pleasure comes with a few caveats:

• Especially for Storytellers that are unsure in their mastery of the roles, I’d advise coming up with a menu of what combinations roles to include in the game, ideally one more than you think you’ll need and to think through some of the possible first night choices to make the roles work dramatically together. In my fourth game, I was trying to work in some roles that hadn’t been seen yet but that gave too much early information to the good team and inadvertently gave the evil Poisoner minion little to do. This can be a little tricky, because the exact number of players can be difficult to predict in advance and the how to divvy up team good and evil gets shaken up a lot when going from 9 players to 10, for example. Picking a mix isn’t that hard in real time, but if trying to get in a few sessions in one day, inexperienced Storytellers such as myself may do better to do what we can in advance.
• I think the having fun section should highlight to keep an eye not just on the balance between good and evil but whether any individuals are having a harder time of it, e.g. out for anyone getting regularly eliminated in round one or just that by the vagaries of the rules had their power come to naught or otherwise were fortune’s fool. A strength of the instructions is that they recommend negative behavior to watch out for and give some advice in handling it, plus Fabled characters to give the Storyteller tools for more borderline cases like just making it easier for new players.
• This is petty, but I found the rules for how the Butler votes to be confusing. In most other cases, I was just overthinking the rules, and on further consideration the rules made sense and I just got stuck on something. But in this case I was left more confused by the explanatory text, which failed to differentiate between having one’s hand up and whether one’s vote was counted. Reedit cleared it up.

To end on a high note the game materials for Blood on the Clocktower justify the price. Laminate handouts so everyone knows all the roles. A velvet Grimoire that holds pieces in place and makes storytelling an order of magnitude easier. This is a well designed game and while Storytelling still involves some skill, the design lets you focus on the important parts of your job and not the minutiae.