I think our Mafia community is overdue for an injection of variety. Blood on the Clocktower is a social deduction game in the same family as Mafia, maybe even the same genus, but the main mechanics are very different. It was designed to be played in real life, so I am making some changes for online play. You will need to be in the Discord server to play, since that's where private chats will be. I will send you an invite once you sign up. I am hoping for at least ten players. We can go with as few as seven or as many as fifteen.
Here is a non-comprehensive list of differences between Mafia as we are used to it on this site and Blood on the Clocktower:
- There are two teams: Good and Evil. Good wins when the Demon is lynched. Evil wins when there are two players alive and at least one is Evil, or when there is no way for Good to win, e.g., if all living players are Evil, since nobody can nominate the Demon.
- You can create semi-private group chats with other players during the day. What you say is private, but who is in each chat is public knowledge. (This is crucial information. Remember that the next time you hear the government say that collecting metadata is not an invasion of privacy.) Evil players have to create group chats like anyone else to communicate outside the thread, and there is no night chat.
- Roles are drawn from a script: a list of roles that could be in the game. Which roles are in the game is secret. Against my impulse to run something customized or complicated with Thothy flair, I am using the script Trouble Brewing, which is beginner-friendly and has been extensively tested and found to be almost perfectly balanced.
- Dead players can keep talking with living players, both publicly and privately, and can cast one vote after they die. They cannot nominate, i.e., cannot be the first person to vote for someone that day, they lose their role's abilities, and they don't count towards how many people are needed to lynch. Roles and alignments do not flip upon death.
- Some mechanics give the Storyteller (i.e, the game host, i.e, Thoth) limited discretion to choose the results they think will make the fun the most fun or balanced. These mechanics are publicly known from the start of the game. It's not freeform bastard.
- In real-life Blood on the Clocktower, voting is done by one player nominating another player during the voting period, which is after each day's discussion period. All players except the lynch candidate vote by raising their hand for yes or keeping it down for no as the moderator waves his arm around the table. Alas, asynchronicity stops me from running it that way, so the voting system for this game will be that you can vote for as many people as you want at once. Whoever has the most votes at the end of the day will be lynched, unless they have fewer votes than the majority of living players, in which case nobody dies. If there is a tie, nobody is lynched. What a terrible time for Kohai to introduce the upgraded host dashboard.