Blood on the Clocktower
A social deduction game with a live storyteller running the show, so nobody's stuck sitting out silently after they die in round one.
I pick the character set for twenty minutes before anyone arrives. Nobody has ever asked me to stop.
How to play Blood on the Clocktower
- Goal
- Good must identify and kill the Demon. Evil must keep the Demon alive until only two players remain alive.
- Set up
- Choose a script and one Storyteller. Seat everyone in a circle, deal the correct mix of secret roles for the player count, and have the Storyteller record every role in the Grimoire.
- Play
- At night, the Storyteller wakes roles in order to use abilities and share information. By day, everyone talks, nominates, and votes. A nominee needs at least half the living players and more votes than every other nominee to be executed; a tie means no execution. Repeat night and day.
- Finish
- Good normally wins when the Demon dies. Evil normally wins when only two players remain alive, though character abilities can override either ending.
- Easy to miss
- Death is not elimination. Dead players still talk and win or lose with their team, but lose their ability, cannot nominate, and have only one vote left for the rest of the game.
Try a round: What the Storyteller tells you
The Empath
The first night
You are the Empath. Each night, while the town sleeps, you learn how many of your two living neighbors are evil, and tonight the hand in the dark shows you a closed fist. Zero. Nobody else at this table has anything like that, and you go back to sleep certain of two people, which in this game is a small fortune.
What you were told
Night one
0
Night two
Night three
Nothing in this game is discovered; information is poured, in measures, by the only person who knows what is in the bottle.
The dead keep talking
Blood on the Clocktower starts with Werewolf, then fixes the part where an early death leaves someone silent for the next hour. Instead of a rotating narrator, one full-time Storyteller runs the game live and chooses that night's character set. The roles give players more to do than wait to hear "you die tonight, say nothing." Even the dead stay with their team and have limited votes, so they still have a reason to pay attention.
The game rewards a group that will actually debate and accuse one another, and occasionally lie well. Once people get invested, it eats the evening. It also needs exactly one person who wants to learn the Storyteller role properly.
The Storyteller is the difficulty setting
The Storyteller tracks every role, wakes players in the right order, answers private questions, and decides when the day's suspicion is useful enough to move to nominations. For a first game, use the beginner script, Trouble Brewing, and learn its night order before people arrive. Players will forgive the game for lying to them. They are less patient while the person holding the Grimoire searches for the next token.
Tell new players explicitly that they may have private conversations. Without that permission, the day can turn into one long courtroom run by its two loudest attorneys. Let people split off to compare claims and come back with a theory, then call the room together before nominations wander into a second dinner break. When the town comes back, people have different claims and theories to compare.
Give the host the job in advance
Clocktower is a bad game to spring on a host. The Storyteller does not get an ordinary role, the teach is longer than the box makes it look, and a reluctant host can flatten a very good group. Decide who is running it before anyone travels. Make sure that person wants the job.
Clocktower works for a room that enjoys lying and keeping notes, then revisiting one careless sentence for twenty minutes. Anyone looking for a background game or a fixed end time should pick something shorter. The same goes for players who want clean information they can solve like a logic grid.
Five players is legal. We wait for enough voices to support two plausible stories, and enough evening to hear both.
Ways to play
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