games for fans of the traitors

If you’re looking to experience the thrill of the television show The Traitors, here are several game recommendations.  I’ve included some game design thoughts with each choice listed below as it compares to the gameplay of The Traitors.  However, if you want to skip all that and just need, say, a Christmas present for the Traitors fan in your life, the whole list is at the top.

• Mafia/Werewolf
• The Resistance: Avalon
• Blood on the Clocktower
• One Night Ultimate Werewolf
• Coup
• Citadels
• Secret Hitler
• Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

The Traitors

When discussing the game design of The Traitors, it is important to remember that The Traitors is designed to be entertainment, not a game.  This means that it prioritises creating a good viewing experience over anything else.

Here are some considerations:

1. The Edit

1. The final edit of the show portrays situations to the viewers in a way that amps up drama or directs the narrative.  What is shown to the viewer is not the full story, and is edited in such a way, with the use of cinematography techniques (lighting, music, sound effects, composition, timing, etc.) to present a compelling story for that series.  The producers know what happens in the end, and can work backwards to develop a story for each of the “characters” and an overall story for the series.  This results in what is commonly known as a “hero edit” or “villain edit” for certain contestants, in the name of good television.

2. Producer Interference

1. Producers will tilt the game in favour of the Faithful or the Traitors.  Though some people get outraged by the idea of producers meddling in the game (or claim it doesn’t happen), making adjustments along the way is necessary in developing an entertaining series for the viewer.  The best way this can happen is invisibly, usually in a way that forces interactions between players:
   1. A mission that forces players to form small teams
   2. Car rides to or from the castle with specific passengers
   3. Seating arrangements at a dinner party or the Round Table
2. But, producers do make mistakes and create situations that feel unfair to the viewers.  One such example is the introduction of the Seer mechanic in The Traitors UK Series 3, which forced a certain outcome of the game in a way that many viewers felt was “cheating”.

3. Metagame

1. Because this is television, players can make educated guesses about Traitors based on who production might have picked to be entertaining or dramatic, or to spread out across certain demographics.  Additionally, contestants can use their knowledge of producer interference to infer as to why certain people are grouped together.
   1. These moments are often left out of the edit, like in The Traitors UK Series 1, there was allegedly a moment when Alyssa imitated the host that revealed crucial information.
   2. In recent series, more metagaming is shown, like guessing who production would put as a Traitor for entertainment purposes, like the “Big Dog” theory in The Celebrity Traitors UK Series 1.

4. The Business

1. Contestants on The Traitors are under contract not to share elements about the show that could break the viewing experience.  The Celebrity Traitors UK Series 1 participant Jonathan Ross said:
   1. “I didn’t realise, but I’m not allowed to talk about the stuff that’s edited out, which I can understand why… When I started talking about it last week, they sent us all a kind of list saying, ‘Just to remind you, these are the things in your contracts you’re not allowed to talk about…’  There’s a fairly comprehensive list, and most of it I can see is to protect the integrity of the game as a viewing experience for people, so it makes perfect sense.”

If we peel away the engineering of The Traitors, we’re left with a very simple game.  Which brings us to…

Mafia/Werewolf

The Traitors is basically a game of Werewolf.  It was developed as Mafia in 1986 by psychology student Dimitry Davidoff, who has spoken about how he was never contacted by the creators of the Traitors television show format.  If you want the closest possible gameplay to The Traitors, you’d do well to pick up (or print) a copy of Werewolf, simple as that.

Endgame

A major problem for The Traitors as a game is that the show cannot end with more than 3 players.  If a Traitor is banished early in the game, another player is likely to be recruited.  This muddies the waters and changes the behaviours and intentions of players, which makes it more complex for the Faithfuls to find the Traitors.  Thus, the real goal of the game for a Faithful is not to banish Traitors, but to ally with known Traitors and escape banishment and murder themselves.  Despite this, the messaging of The Traitors‘ host to the Faithful players is that they are meant to get rid of Traitors, which is wrong.

Werewolf is a better game because the goal is far clearer.  Eliminating the Werewolves does not trigger the complicated recruitment mechanic, but in fact advances the Villagers’ cause.  This progress for the Villagers can allow them to win with many Villagers still alive, as the game automatically ends once all three Werewolves are banished.

More roles that trigger different mechanics can be added to game, but in the case of vanilla Werewolf, the simple, clear and non-shifting goals are more effective and satisfying than The Traitors‘.

The Seer

Fans of The Traitors UK might be surprised to know that the Seer mechanic is actually pretty effective in the original Werewolf game.  This is because the Seer is random and unknown to the rest of the group.  When it was haphazardly included in the final stages of The Traitors UK Series 3, it snowballed into an unfixable endgame.  This is because the Seer and the person who they chose to see were known to the players.  While other Traitors series worldwide incorporated the Seer in more successful ways, the UK series showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanic.

An unknown Seer provides players with the only true knowledge in the game.  This is important at the outset of the game because the main weakness of Werewolf is that there is no information whatsoever.  Knowing that a Seer is in play means that someone knows the identity of another player for sure.  However, it is still a weak solution to the lack of information problem, because there is also no way to know when a Seer has been banished or murdered.

Information

But, that means that the main weakness of The Traitors also exists in Werewolf, namely, that you are guessing with zero information.  All you have is someone’s word that they are a Faithful/Villager, and your own instincts about who is lying.

In the regular Traitors series, guessing amongst strangers makes for very difficult gameplay.  It turns into a social deception game that is about understanding mob mentality most of all, and trying to behave a certain way at a certain time.  There is almost no gameplay.  Too outspoken or too quiet, too much of a leader or too much of a follower, none of it actually provides evidence about whether you are on the good team or the bad team.

The reason that The Celebrity Traitors UK is so compelling is because the participants all have established personalities that are known to each other and to the audience.  This is key to the success of the Werewolf format.  You need a basis of knowing the other people in order for guessing to have any basis or tells.  So, Werewolf must be played with friends for the best experience.

Still, this big weakness of having virtually no information can be improved…

The Resistance: Avalon

The Resistance is a great example of balancing the social deduction and evidence aspects of gameplay like The Traitors.  Its Arthurian-themed edition, The Resistance: Avalon, sends sub-groups of players on quests where Evil players are trying to fail the mission.  The Round Table-like debate takes place during the selection of the questing parties, where Good and Evil players are trying to decide who to send by deducing the loyalties of each other based on previous missions.

Missions

One of the loudest criticisms of The Traitors is that the missions are rather pointless.  The missions function to add gold to the prize pot and sometimes to protect players from murder.  But, there is no real way to identify a Traitor based on their behaviour during a mission.  The Traitors board game seems to understand this, and adds a mechanic where Traitors need to complete tasks to earn the right to murder.

In The Traitors, many of the missions are based on luck, physical prowess, or trivia.  The best missions provide players with information about other players, or force them to make decisions that could earn safety from murder for one or some of them.  But I’d argue that these missions don’t go far enough and aren’t helpful to the Faithful.

Because the Traitors and the Faithful have the same goal in the missions, these activities strengthen their bonds rather than encouraging dissent or revealing clues.  A solution, then, is to give the Traitors goals that oppose or interfere with the ones of the Faithful.

By including mission failures as part of the game, The Resistance gives players evidence and reason to suspect players beyond their word.  Gameplay thus relies on a combination of logic and social deduction.

No One Dies

One of the advantages this game has over The Traitors and Werewolf is that players can keep playing to the end.  Viewers of the television show can be disheartened if their favourite player gets banished or murdered early on, removing them from the programme entirely.  Similarly, Werewolf is not fun for anyone who is knocked out early and can no longer participate.

Roles

The Resistance: Avalon gains more depth than vanilla Werewolf and The Traitors with the role of Merlin, a player who knows the loyalties of all players, but can lose the game for Good if they are assassinated by Evil at the end.  There are more roles with special abilities that can additional complexities to the game for experienced players.

More complicated social deduction games include various roles and abilities that players keep secret, improving upon the Faithful/Traitor dichotomy by providing more dynamic and interesting gameplay.  For example…

Blood on the Clocktower

A popular social deduction game, Blood on the Clocktower is Werewolf turned up to a thousand while leaning into Dungeons & Dragons.  A similar story and goal of a Demon terrorising a village gets expanded with every player getting some sort of extra ability.  This makes gameplay feel more active and allows the players to use logic.

Blood on the Clocktower‘s roles and mechanics are complex, and variations on them make the game replayable, but do require a lot of learning and investment from the players.  Though players can die in this game, they can still participate and even win after death, and it can even be a strategic move to nominate oneself or one’s allies for execution depending on the game state.

The Storyteller

Werewolf requires a moderator to run the game, but Blood on the Clocktower elevates this role to what they call the Storyteller.  Like a D&D Dungeon Master, this player performs the mechanics of the typical morning/night cycle, carries out player abilities and murders, and adds a bit of narrative flair.  Crucially, the Storyteller is encouraged to pull and push on the game the same way the producers would in a series of Traitors, but with a critical difference.  Here, the Storyteller seeks to enhance the fun for players, rather than viewers.

Gameplay is deep.  While the intricacies of Blood on the Clocktower make it an unlikely choice for a mainstream television show like The Traitors, it’s common to see streams played by gaming groups like many tabletop roleplaying games.  A game of Blood on the Clocktower can take several sessions.  The steeper learning curve and time commitment can be intimidating to new players, but the payoff can be ultimately more rewarding than the simpler iterations of this format.

Other Similar Games to The Traitors

Here are some other social deduction games you might consider bringing to board game night if you’re a fan of The Traitors.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf

This keeps the bones of the Werewolf-style social deduction game, where you have to kill either a Werewolf or a villager (or get yourself murdered as the Tanner, which is the best mechanic in this version).  But it’s deceptively a more complex game than Werewolf because of the player roles.  Over the course of the “one night”, players’ abilities force them to switch roles and peek at cards.  When you wake up, you might be on a different team without even knowing.  It takes a few rounds of practice to really enjoy this game, as it can be very confusing at the outset.  Experienced players can go deep on strategy, and strategic bluffing is necessary as part of gameplay.  If you consider this a puzzle that you’re all trying to solve each other’s roles together, it can be pretty fun, but it does take a few games to get there.

Coup

This card game is a classic social deduction game that works a little differently from The Traitors.  It requires deceiving other players by claiming to be a particular role and performing actions to gain influence based on that role.  It has a smaller player count required and is easier to pick up than a lot of the other games, though it doesn’t have the vibes of the murders and such of The Traitors.

Citadels

Similar to Coup, Citadels is a card game about building a city based on lying about what roles you have each turn.  Social deduction is less important to the gameplay here, and there’s more strategy involved about how best to build locations and manage resources.  It’s a great starting point for players new to board and card games, especially if you are just getting used to roles and abilities, which are big parts of social deduction games.

Secret Hitler

Secret Hitler is completely different from any of the other social deduction games and while it sounds intimidating with the whole passing policies talk, it’s actually relatively easy to pick up.  It’s thematically well-designed, and a great learning game that captures, in very broad strokes, the liberal/fascist ideologies in its goals and mechanics.  Play this one with friends; the debates get heated.

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

The social deduction in Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is overshadowed by the internal logic of the game, where the gamemaster, called the Forensic Scientist, is providing clues that point to one of the other players, who has to deflect and appear not to be the murderer.  It’s quite simple to catch the murderer, but this board game can be a good jumping off point for getting into social deduction games.