Why do Board Gamers Love The Traitors?

Go to any convention these days and you see them. People sitting in loose oval formation with their heads bowed, eyes closed, sometimes breaking off into two- or three-person clusters for intense, furtive discussions before returning. What is this? I remember thinking. A shelf-of-shame support group? Some new religion?

Nope. Just the social deduction juggernaut that is Blood on the Clocktower.

Social Deduction Tabletop Games

Social deduction/traitor games are nothing new. Diplomacy has, for decades, been the tabletop’s watchword for friendship-ruining skulduggery and betrayal. But Diplomacy comes with the – fundamental – qualifier that any backstabbing is entirely optional. It’s possible to win as an honest broker – if you choose to lie, it’s a choice, not a responsibility baked into the game.

The current social deduction boom is generally attributed to Dimitry Davidoff and the invention of the folk-game Mafia, in Moscow State University’s psychology department in early 1987. Mafia spread across Soviet universities, and from there, through Europe. Some versions changed the theme from organised crime to werewolves, and branded, boxed variants started to appear on the market.

A quick explanation of the core premise: players are secretly given one of two roles – villager or mafioso/werewolf. The baddies know each other’s identities – they’re instructed to open their eyes and look at each other while everyone else keeps theirs closed – and play proceeds in two phases: a ‘night’ phase where the baddies pick one good player to be ‘murdered’ (i.e. eliminated), and a ‘day’ phase where the eliminated player is revealed, then the survivors have a vote on who they want to eliminate. Thematically, they’re hanging the suspected werewolf/crook in the village square. The goodies win if all the baddies are eliminated and vice versa. The baddies are in the minority, but they have the advantage of information.

Related article: Best Social Deduction Games

The Traitors

One of Davidoff’s children was the Dutch reality TV show De Verraders, remade by the BBC in 2022 as The Traitors. It’s essentially Mafia with a few tweaks that make the format more visual. Twenty-two players are competing for a share of a potential six-figure prize fund. Most are villagers – ‘Faithful’ – and a minority are Traitors. Just like in Mafia, at night, the Traitors get to meet up and pick a player to murder. In the day, everyone – including those players who are secretly Traitors – work together on tasks to add to the prize money, then get to pick someone to banish. If, at the end of the series, all the remaining contestants are Faithful, they split the prize pot between them. If any Traitors are amongst them, the Traitors get the money instead.

The show lets viewers know who the Traitors are. This means we get to watch the Traitors’ deliberations as they decide who to take out, they can do pieces to camera where they explain their gameplan, and every conversation they have with another player feels full of menace.

It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s bomb under the table theory of suspense in movies – if two characters are talking in a café and a time bomb under the table explodes that we didn’t know about, we get five seconds of shock and drama. If, on the other hand, ‘the bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it… In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the secret.’ All the screen time leading up to the explosion becomes unbearably tense.

The flipside to this is that we, the viewers, have a godlike advantage over the naïve Faithful contestants. You see it in the tone of a lot of online commentary – so-and-so was an obvious liar, the Faithful should have done this, and so on. Harry Clark, Series 2 winner (and Traitor), displayed considerable skill and ingenuity in conniving his way to a lone victory, but a lot of the immediate reaction lambasted his fellow contestants for not sniffing him out – an easy criticism to make when you’ve known everyone’s identities since episode one.

Over three series, viewing figures have steadily soared, as have people willing to be contestants. Series 1 had a reported 1,500 applicants, Series 2 had 40,000, and Series 3 had over 300,000. Clearly this is not yet a format in danger of running out of steam. And with video games like Among Us remaining popular with streamers, social deduction seems like a genre whose time has come.

Given that Mafia needs no more than a pen and paper (and actually, you can get by without even those) it might be surprising that Blood on the Clocktower – essentially Mafia/Werewolf with many more roles and a tweaked ruleset – has become so dominant in the social deduction space, especially as it retails for over £100. But the consensus amongst players is that it offers so much atmosphere and depth while solving issues around player elimination – and even late arrivals – that it’s worth the sizeable investment.

Blood on the Clocktower

I spoke with veteran runner of Blood on the Clocktower (and author of game compendium The Floor Is Lava) Ivan Brett about the appeal of social deduction games. Not only does he regularly host Clocktower sessions at tabletop events across the country, but he has a particular insight into the genre, having been a contestant on The Traitors first series.

“Social deduction games are a form of soft roleplay,” he says, “in that you’re assigned a role, then you decide what that role means in terms of play. So, when you pull an evil character in Blood on the Clocktower, you decide what that means for you.” Maybe you set out to earn another player’s trust so you can manipulate them. Maybe you hurl wild accusations around to pull focus from your co-conspirators. Maybe you sit back, say nothing, and pick your battles.

“By choosing that role, then testing it out, you are exploring identity and social roles in a group that celebrates that.” For Ivan, one of the things that is so powerful about gaming in a safe environment, especially for people who are figuring out their identity or have some challenges when it comes to social interactions “is that it’s a safe place to try out those things.”

The safety part is really important. “I think if we go back to Diplomacy, the reason why there potentially isn’t safety there is because people aren’t necessarily being explicit about what is a role and what is them as the player. Most social deduction or hidden role games have that one, inbuilt step of abstraction: ‘oh, I’m not Emily, I’m the clockmaker’”.

Ivan says one way to help emphasise that distinction is to ham up the theatre of it a bit. “It’s about having a storyteller who is very, very clear we are playing a role.” He makes sure to underline the difference between “you, the player, and this, your character.”

When it works, this group ritual of consensual deception can be oddly bonding. Unlike on a TV show, where the equivalent of several years’ salary is on the line, when you play at a convention the only stakes are in the fictional drama, plus a dab of personal pride. But also, as Ivan points out, there’s also the simple thrill of being a bit naughty and getting away with it. “We meet up online every Tuesday… and we take it in turns to be a rascal.”