Saturday, August 27, 2022

Blood At the Witching Hour

The day was ticking onwards. I had been slowly working to earn the trust of the villagers, working to seem helpful while I divulged information that I had supposedly gleaned from my abilities. Of course, I was actually a Demon who had been slowly killing them off, one at a time, and in actuality I was scrambling to make sure my cover story was accurate. Unfortunately, my alleged ability only gave me information about people who were sitting next to me, and I had unluckily been seated near my devoted minion, who I was forced to implicate early in the game. Even worse, unbeknownst to me, a mastermind had been piecing together information to great effect...soon after, I was executed by the town, and they celebrated victory. While it wasn't a fully unfamiliar experience, my first game of Blood on the Clocktower contained some intriguing surprises.

Introducing Yet Another Werewolf Game

I was originally pretty skeptical of Blood on the Clocktower, a much-vaunted game in the Werewolf family. If you're not familiar with Werewolf/Mafia, it's a game of deception and group paranoia where a group of players try to ferret out and execute the traitor among them before they're all killed off. Into this landscape came Blood, to great acclaim. The reviews I'd seen focused on points like "gives dead players something to do" or "has powers that give out bits of information so that you have something to go off of", and, well...I wasn't impressed by that idea. The problem was, none of that was new or fresh to me. I've played plenty of excellent Werewolf-style games, whether it was the phenomenal Witch Hunt or another, wilder forum Mafia variant. Roles that could appear on good or evil players, unique forms of information-gathering, mechanical puzzles that expressed themselves through the frame of social deduction, and incredibly potent abilities that dead players on both the good and evil sides had access to. When I finally got to play Blood, my suspicions were definitely confirmed: these strengths had been greatly oversold. But, I discovered some fascinating experiences in exchange.

What Sets Blood Apart

For reasons I don't fully understand (although I have my hypotheses), the most interesting features of Blood on the Clocktower don't get talked about at all. There's changes that the game makes which turn the dynamic of a Werewolf game into something substantially different. There's two I can immedialy think of, which surprised me by changing the way I had to evaluate the game--especially when I started the game with the traitor role!
  • Dead players still get one last vote, but more importantly, dead players still get to talk, which is something I have legitimately not seen in this style of game. In fact, allowing dead players any form of communication tends to be heavily restricted to very specific powers in other Werewolf games.
  • Many roles have decision points which give the moderator options for resolution. The idea that Blood empowers its narrator/moderator to be a "gamemaster" is something that pops up frequently in discussion--but this is the specific mechanic which actually enables it.
The change to the way dead players operate was an immense shock to me, because, well, one of the traditional strategies in Werewolf is for the traitor player(s) to kill off insightful players before they can gather too much information about a situation/put things together. I haven't made up my mind how I feel about this change, but it's absolutely a shift in the dynamic of the game. On a mechanical level, it means that the Demon's kills are more of a timer/score. They do reduce the voting power of the town by a portion, but they also no longer prevent the passing-around of information, so the only way they have mechanical effect is that players with continuing abilities are better targets, since they can still gather more information. Anyone who already had information (such as roles that get all their information at the start of the game) is barely impacted. From a user-experience standpoint, though, the change is colossal: not only do you not have the frustration of being unable to speak, but you get to speculate about the game openly in a useful way, without worrying about attracting negative attention. The "gamemaster" concept in Blood is even more unorthodox, though! In other versions of Werewolf games, all roles are deterministic. If there are decisions to be randomized, they are made at the start of the game, almost always. Roles follow predictable patterns: a Gambler has immunity on odd-numbered or even-numbered nights, the last surviving Musketeer gets to kill someone the moment that the other members of their trio are dead, and so on. The moderator doesn't make decisions, they're around to make the game move smoothly. They're an impartial referee. In Blood, there's a transition similar to the change that happened in role-playing games: the role of the referee began to transition to the role of an administrator with an agenda. In Blood, the agenda is "make the game go to the final day, if possible". What's interesting is that their tools are still limited: they get latitude with some roles, but they don't get the freedom to break the rules that were set at the start of the game--transparency is preserved.

Games As Experience

Positioning the moderator as a "Storyteller" means that Blood takes on a different approach in terms of what it is, and what it invites its players to do. Because the moderator shows partiality, with the intent of keeping the game continuously balanced, the game can be disappointing for people who come with a competitive mindset. After all, if doing well just gets the moderator to help the other team, it feels bad to play well. However, that's not the only reason to play a game, and this is where Blood on the Clocktower shines. The core experience of Werewolf games has always been an ongoing narrative. We see this phenomenon even in the recent digital playspace of Among Us, where friend groups get on and laugh, backstab, and goof around. It's the sort of game that gets better when you take it a bit less seriously, because it's a sort of dynamic narrative. You have "character dynamics" between players, you have the suspense of not knowing who the villains are, you have the spectacle of sudden revelations of information, and you even have the tension of knowing things that others don't, as that irony plays out over the course of the game. It's a reminder that games are an experience, and games tell stories. The story of a game is a combination of the design of the rules and the culture of play that the players approach it with: many games require some level of intentional play and tension, but the experience is sometimes most rewarding when everyone is more interested in exploring the game than in optimizing their chances of victory. (There is a different joy and interest found in that optimization, but that's a topic for another day.) It's about feeling like there's puzzles to unravel, and that you're part of an exciting narrative, and Blood on the Clocktower seeks out a middle ground: more freedom than in most games, but more restriction than even the most structured role-playing games. It's a game that's meant to be memorable, and on that point, I think it delivers.

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