“Blood on the Clocktower” (BotC) (2022) is a social deduction game by Steven Medway with additional pieces by Micaela Dawn, Aidan Roberts, John VanFleet, Grace VanFleet, Evin Donohoe, John Hanna, and Chloe McDougall. Ben Burns has also spearheaded many of their later releases and the support for their community creation community. It’s primarily produced by The Pandemonium Institute (TPI), though some editions and locations have also been in cooperation with Bumble3ee Interactive and Funtails.
First of all, what is a social deduction game? These are games that use some mechanical information but primarily social interactions to deduce who is on the “good” team and who is on the “bad” team. Popular examples of this are the party games “Werewolf” and “Mafia,” but other examples include “One Night Werewolf,” “Secret Hitler,” “Wolvesville,” “Town of Salem,” and even “Among Us.” Each of these have different mechanics – from seeing roles to passing laws to who can or can’t vent – that can be used to deduce if someone is on the good or bad team. Ultimately, you vote on who dies, and whichever team is left alive wins.
BotC is like all of these. Except on steroids. And sometimes you kill God (aka the Storyteller).
The basic setup is pretty simple, though pretend there’s an asterisk on every statement (because there’s an exception to just about every rule). There’s a good team and an evil team. The good team is comprised of Townsfolk (good players with abilities that help the good team) and Outsiders (good players with abilities that are likely to help the evil team). The evil team is comprised of Minions (evil players with abilities meant to help the evil team and sow chaos), and the Demon (one evil player who can kill players at night, but if they die, evil loses). Travelers can come early or late and have stronger abilities; everyone knows their role, but they might be good or evil. Finally, Fabled are more or less house rules that help address mechanical deficiencies. There are also things like drunkenness or poisoning to pass out false information, madness to incentivize lying, and “may/might” mechanics so that the Storyteller (the person running the game) can decide to introduce uncertainty. The goal of the Storyteller is to get the game to a “final-day scenario,” i.e., three people alive, one being the Demon and at least one other being good. If the demon and one other player are left alive (or if all living players are evil), evil wins.
There are a lot of potential characters in BotC – about 160 in total. This means they’re divided into so-called scripts, which have certain character combinations, usually centered around a particular theme. 13 Townsfolk, 4 Outsiders, 4 Minions, and 4 Demons is generally the default number of characters on a script, though even official scripts don’t always have this (Trouble Brewing, for instance, has one Demon instead of 4).
You can die through getting killed by a player ability (usually a demon, though there are others, ranging from the Gossip or the Virgin as Townsfolk to the Witch or the Godfather as minions), or by being executed, which requires a minimum number of votes equal to half the living players rounded up; ties result in no execution. Once dead, you can no longer use your ability or nominate. However, you can still talk with everyone, and once per game, you can use a “vote token” to vote after death. These are important departures from the standard format, where death means you’re out of play. It keeps players engaged and means there’s always something to do even after death.
BotC’s greatest strength and weakness lie in its mechanical complexity. In a game like “Among Us,” at the end of the day, you might make the decision: “Is yellow or blue lying when they say they saw the other leaving Electrical?” Your evidence for this is primarily social: Do you trust yellow or blue more? In “Werewolf,” you might have to make the call: “is Alex really the seer who saw Taylor and Jayden as werewolves?” Your evidence is, again, primarily social: Do you trust Alex’s seer claim? In theory, in BotC, you can puzzle through true and false information and determine what is true. Now, “in theory” is doing some very heavy lifting in that sentence; if you are relying on the Dreamer or the Fortune Teller to be the good team’s primary source of reliable information and they die early on, that might all get thrown out the window. That said, the information is both vague and unreliable enough that it’s difficult to parse what is or isn’t true, but possible. This is a really positive aspect in my opinion – it allows you to consider logically what might be happening, and rewards clever plays better than pure social reads do. That said, to do this, there are once again 160 characters, give or take. That is a ridiculous amount of information to track.
This is further compounded by a particular Fabled, the Bootlegger. The Bootlegger allows you to bring homebrew content into the game. Homebrew (in any gaming community) refers to fanmade content that supplements official, to expand options. Homebrewing is far from exclusive to BotC – for those who follow gaming news, you may remember the drama surrounding the recent attempts by Wizards of the Coast (WotC) to change the Open Game License (OGL) for “Dungeons and Dragons” (D&D). That was primarily an attempt to restrict homebrew creations. There are a lot of different stances people hold towards homebrew – WotC has historically used its OGL to pursue legal action against those they believe have stolen the intellectual property to D&D by creating homebrew content for it (looking at you, Paizo), while Evil Hat Productions is fairly neutral and Mork Börg even allows its name and trademarks to be used freely on homebrew content. TPI has also taken a homebrew-positive view. This is why I mentioned Burns at the start of the article – he’s meant to oversee this community and provide institutional support for it.
With the Bootlegger as an actual mechanic and a TPI employee dedicated to supporting the homebrewing community, BotC’s homebrew community has blossomed at a rate that I don’t think even D&D’s community has (and that’s spun off multiple separate companies). I’m not innocent of this – I’ve created several homebrew characters of my own (such as the DJ, the Anarchist, the Vigilante, and the Vampire), and a couple of homebrew scripts (such as “Who’s the Real One?”, meant to highlight the DJ’s abilities) for private groups. BotC is arguably a community primarily propped up by its ability to create homebrews. A group that I’m currently in is currently navigating a situation where most players are getting bored with the more basic scripts. We’ve had to largely abandon those to and stick more strictly to homebrew to keep interest. This isn’t to say the official scripts are bad, they just get old. BotC and TPI don’t just embrace homebrew, they need it to keep their community alive.
This is where I (as a dedicated and lifelong homebrewer of many gaming systems) take issue. It’s totally fine to want to create your own content for a game. But if you’re being propped up not by your laurels, but by the community’s dedication, that is a problem, because you’re out of luck if you lose that community. That would be my big caution with this game. I’m concerned about the long-term viability of any game that is reliant on homebrew to create interest – not just one where homebrew exists, and players enjoy it.
Who would I recommend BotC for? If you like social deduction games and are looking for more, BotC is truly the king of them. If you want a puzzle that uses randomness and meta-manipulation to be different every time, this game is probably for you, too. If you are a die-hard homebrewer looking for a new hyperfixation, then welcome to the club. Just be prepared to put in work outside of the game – either to find supplementary content or to develop your own, because you probably will need it.
