Blood on the Clocktower on Youtube
▼ A few months ago I discovered the game "Blood on the Clocktower". That's a "social deduction" game you play with between 5 and 20 people. The way it works has things in common with games like Werewolf and Mafia: there is a small and secret evil team that normally knows each other, and a bigger good team that tries to hunt down the evil team, especially its leader the "demon". When the good guys kill the demon, they win. If the demon survives until there are only two players left, the evil team wins.
Each player is a specific character that has a special ability. The game is split in night and day phases. Some characters learn information the first night and that's it, others wake up every night to learn information or do things at subsequent nights. Also, most demons most of the time kill players at night, and during the day, after discussions in smaller groups and with the whole "town", players nominatie someone to be "executed". They then vote. This can happen multiple times, with the player getting the most votes being executed.
It's a really fun game to play in person, and a lot of people also play it online. Another way to enjoy the game is to watch videos on Youtube (or Twitch I guess) and see other people play. That's what this blog post is about.
There are many variations of these videos. The first thing you need to know is that there are three "scripts" included in the game. A script consists of a set of characters. The story teller selects from these characters and puts tokens in a bag that is circulated so everyone can take out a badge and learn their character. (Online this is usually done by a random generator, not by the story teller.) The story teller then collects these tokens and puts those in their "grimoire" to track what's going on.
The simplest script is Trouble Brewing. You should almost certainly get familiar with the characters in this script before moving on to Bad Moon Rising and Sects and Violets, which are more complex. And be familiar with those before looking at or playing custom scripts. Each of these add new characters and having too many of those at once makes it very hard to determine what's going on.
This means it's a very bad idea to let the Youtube algorithm serve you up new episodes. What you want to do is follow a group from their beginning, when they play Trouble Brewing, and then learn about players and play styles (very important for the social part of the social deduction!) and learn new scripts along with them.
Another consideration is the type of video. Many are streams of online games are from the perspective of the story teller with no real editing. That has the downside that you don't get to see the interactions between couples or smaller groups, and often there is idle time. What I really don't like is earlier ones with only audio, no video. From the perspective of a player can be interesting. But there's also the online games that are edited so you get to see the one-on-one and small group interactions.
I really like the early days of No Rolls Barred in this regard, and especially Survivors play Blood on the Clocktower. These each have "official story teller" from the Pandemonium Institute Ben Burns on a lot or always, and he explains a lot of stuff in a way useful for newbies.
Then there's the in-person games. No Rolles Bared started doing those a few years ago, and they're pretty good. Also the Good Times Society but I'm less sure I really like them. These both have high production values. Mt Unpleasant is more modest, but I really like them. And recently The Megavoid started these videos. The latter two can be a bit harder to understand at times as people speak softly because there are others close by.
These games can run quite long. If you're not sure you want to invest that much time, I recommend this one as your first video, and when you are ready to learn more info about the game and how to play it, this is a good watch as it explains a bunch of stuff.
Keep a close eye on the Blood on the Clocktower wiki to look up the base scripts and all available characters.
I made a bunch of public Youtube playlists. The main one is Blood on the Clocktower. You can add videos to this list and vote them up and down. Then there's the following:
- BotC Trouble Brewing (this link keeps failing for reasons that I don't understand...)
- BotC Bad Moon Rising
- BotC Sects & Violets
- BotC custom scripts
I will put videos added to that main playlist into the right category. Note that the playlists are all in oldest-to-newest order, as I really think you should grow along with a group over time and not jump around.
Something that isn't always immediately obvious is the numbers of the various different players. Before things get really complex, there's three main categories, one that's common but not always present and one special one:
- Townsfolk: normal good players with a helpful ability
- The demon
- Minions: evil players with abilities that get in the way of the good team
- Outsiders: good players that have unhelpful abilities
- Travelers: players with a known ability, but they may be good or evil
The number of players in each category is according to this list which is hard to find online:
| Players | Townsfolk | Outsiders | Minions | Demons |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 3 | - | 1 | 1 |
| 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 7 | 5 | - | 1 | 1 |
| 8 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 9 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 10 | 7 | - | 2 | 1 |
| 11 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| 12 | 7 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| 13 | 9 | - | 3 | 1 |
| 14 | 9 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| 15 | 9 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
