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How to make friends by lying to them

With the rise of social deduction games like Blood on the Clocktower, everyone can be a traitor now.

Sometimes the best way to make friends is to lie. Around the world, people are gathering together to try to figure out if the person next to them is on their side — or is trying to double-cross them. By the end of the process, trickery or no, they’re deeply bonded.

Social deduction games (and the related sister category social deception games) have been around for decades and come in a myriad of formats, including Mafia, Werewolf, and the newer entry, Blood on the Clocktower. Their defining trait is that some players have hidden roles, and the rest of the players have to work out who those people are through social interactions: hinting, lying, interrogating, deducing, obfuscating. If you’ve seen The Traitors, you get the gist.

In social deduction games, some players have secret roles. Everyone else has to find out who they are through social interaction.

With The Traitors a big TV hit and Blood on the Clocktower taking over the nerd internet, these games are trending up.

Experts say that playing games that encourage you to play anti-social roles can create pro-social bonds.

They also give players a way to practice conflict in a low-stakes space — an especially powerful tool at a time when Americans are so isolated and polarized.

Longtime players say these games have allowed them to build deep and meaningful friendships.

Right now, this whole category is trending up. The most recent season premiere of The Traitors in the US drew 638 million viewing minutes in January on Peacock. Meanwhile, Blood on the Clocktower has sold 100,000 games worldwide, is listed as BoardGameGeek’s No. 1 party game, and recently announced that it will be publishing tie-in novels with popular science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor.

Like all nerd trends, social deduction games are big online. But perhaps more importantly, they’re also big in person.

“I’ve been running game conventions for almost 20 years now,” says Jeff Anderson, the owner of the event planning company Qwyx Events. Anderson says that when Werewolf was at its peak in 2019, his cons would usually fill two rooms with Werewolf players. Now, he says, “I think we’re up to three or four dedicated setups to run Blood on the Clocktower,” and he still has a room full of Werewolf enthusiasts looking to play, too.

It’s easy to see why playing a game in person is appealing during a time of intense social isolation. But this is also a time when Americans are lonely in part because we disagree on so much and find it difficult to trust one another. Within that context, the prospect of sitting in a room with a bunch of people and having full license to lie to them seems to be paradoxically irresistible.

Playing anti-social games in an anti-social age

Descended from the murder mystery games of the 1920s, social........

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