How to make friends by lying to them

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.

Key takeaways

• 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 deduction games first took their modern format in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when a psychology student invented Mafia as a research game. Soviet ex-pats took their new hobby abroad, where it sprouted variants. In the 2000s, Werewolf took the tech world by storm.

Around the same time that Werewolf was heating up, tabletop games in general became more complex and interesting, says Asher McClennahan, Kickstarter’s head of games. During the Monopoly era of millennial childhoods, games were mostly what McClennahan calls “technical manuals for fun,” but the 2000s saw the debut of more flexible, spontaneous games like Ticket to Ride. Tabletop games became increasingly popular in the years that followed, and social deduction games benefited from this renaissance. In 2016, Secret Hitler ascended at the same time as Donald Trump. The video game Among Us became one of the early hits of the pandemic in 2020. Blood on the Clocktower was published in May 2022, and a mere six months later, The Traitors had its triumphant premiere in the UK.

It’s no accident that this category has taken off during a time of radical change in the ways humans relate to each other. We interact through our screens now, exposing more of ourselves to more people than we could have imagined 30 years ago. The algorithm rewards outrageous corruption and vice, as do American politics and the economy of American fame. The idea of getting away with a little (controlled and consensual) anti-social behavior at a time when anti-social people are getting away with a lot is fun.

Gray Atherton, a UK-based psychologist who specializes in the way that games shape our behavior and cognition, says that it’s this subversion of cultural norms that’s most appealing about social deduction games. To win, you have to double-cross and break trust with ruthless commitment. Breaking that taboo as part of a group creates prosocial bonds.

“You’re able to have that safe space — we call it in gaming this magic circle,” Atherton says. “A lot of the social rules and mores in real life dissolve, and you have permission to be a darker, more insidious character.” Playing a dark character within the game creates dramatic, memorable conflict, but because it all occurs within the magic circle of gameplay, the conflict resolves with no hard feelings.

Not everyone loves creating this sort of dramatic conflict. The first and only time I found myself on Blood on the Clocktower’s Evil team, I was unable to come up with convincing lies on the spot, a personal weakness I found so stressful that I swore off the whole game. But for those drawn to the idea of consequence-free conflict, game space allows free rein to indulge.

That’s especially valuable for people who are almost certainly going to butt heads in real life eventually, like co-workers. Dana Buxbaum owns a board game café in Illinois that’s had an ongoing weekly Blood on the Clocktower game for the past few years. She frequently brings social deduction games to offices as a company bonding activity.

For Buxbaum, the magic starts with team allegiance. “If you’re on the good team, you are bonded with your good players to sus out evil,” she explains. “If you’re on the evil team, you’re trying to be sneaky. You’re with your evil team and you’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s get those goody two shoes.’”

But the game isn’t just about bonding with some players at the expense of the rest. Once active play is over, most social deduction games will have a master of ceremonies explain exactly what happened to those who weren’t in on all the secrets. “So whichever team you were on, you were all part of the story,” Buxbaum says. “That’s one of my favorite aspects. It brings the whole group together.”

All competitive games consist of people working at cross purposes to create something bigger than they are. But within social deduction games, it’s almost impossible to see what the game looks like while you’re playing. It takes the final reveal to see the shape of what you and the rest of your group made. When the final revelation occurs, it makes you all teammates, because you all built something strange and confusing and fascinating together.

Anderson, who runs gaming cons, says that in addition to allowing players to bond with like-minded friends, social deduction games also allow us to rehearse the skills we need to interact with people we disagree with. A key part of this type of game is not just trying to see through others’ trickery to build a mental map of the game world, but also convincing others that your worldview is correct, so that you can all agree together on whom to target. Essentially, you’re practicing arguing about radically different ideas about the world without taking it personally.

Anderson cites the rules of Blood on the Clocktower, which include the instruction to “play nice.”

“This is a game about deception and trickery,” the rules warn, “so please treat others with respect and consideration. Kill with grace, and die with dignity.”

“I think that’s an important aspect of the hobby of social deduction: to recognize that we sometimes need to take a step back,” Anderson says. “I use that as a model for this world we live in right now, because we’re around people who believe differently than we do.”

Making friends through lying

The intimacy that can form in the magic circle of gameplay seems especially appealing during our increasingly traumatic and isolated times. Many of the Clocktower players I spoke with say they began hosting a running game night because they wanted to spend time with other people in the wake of a larger destabilizing event.

Daniel Pyle began his Clocktower website, Pyles of Blood, in the midst of the pandemic, before Blood on the Clocktower had even been officially published.

“I’m at home social distancing like everyone, and I wanted a way to be able to connect with people,” Pyle said. After he saw a tabletop game review YouTube channel give Clocktower a rave, he launched his website in April 2021, using an online version of the game. As soon as it was safe to meet in person, he turned his running internet game into an in-person meeting in Bloomington, Indiana, and he’s kept it going for the past five years.

“Clock’s given me a lot, actually,” he says. “I’ve made a lot of friends through it.”

I experimented with playing Clocktower because I had moved to a new city and wanted to make friends, and I thought that the kind of nerds who all showed up to play a board game together were likely to be the kind of people I could jive with. But this kind of game can also be a way to reinforce existing social connections, not just build new ones from scratch.

Akshith Yellapragada started his running Clocktower game in Brooklyn, New York, after the 2024 election. “I was just very unenthusiastic about the general population, but felt very very enthusiastic about the people that I lived near and were friends with locally in the New York area,” he told Vox. “A huge goal that I had was to bring people together more and more, and to have people hang out offline without phone screens. I wanted to be able to do that in a way that I would be able to continue maintaining week after week after week and not burn out or get tired of.”

Yellapragada decided Clocktower fit the bill. Now he hosts two game nights a month: a private game for his friends, and another that’s open to the public. The fact that you need at least five people to play — but can include as many as 20 players — makes it feel like even more of an event, and it also means he doesn’t have to cancel if a few people bail at the last minute.

Buxbaum has seen Clocktower meetups at her game store lead to several deep relationships. “We’ve had people meet at the cafe playing Blood on the Clocktower, and they’re engaged now,” she says. “It’s really great seeing friendships get made and roommates form.”

Recently, her group had an auxiliary meeting at the home of two of the players. As the game began, the players closed their eyes so they could go about the secret work of murder, sabotage, and spying unobserved. But when they opened their eyes again, the couple hosting were standing up at the front of the room like a bride and groom.

“It was a surprise wedding,” says Buxbaum — a real one, not a wedding within the game. The guests of honor were the heart of the group’s weekly Clocktower game.

After all weeks of lying sweetly to each other’s faces and killing each other with grace, the social deduction players had become what all of us want: the kind of friend you invite to your wedding.

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