I really enjoyed playing Blood on the Clocktower, and it might be my favorite game we’ve played so far this semester. I think I enjoyed it because it was a social deduction game, which I’ve come to enjoy, but unlike Werewolf or Two Rooms and a Boom, for the most part, you can freely talk to anyone you want to. I also really enjoyed the part of the game where if you die you can still participate and don’t have to just stop playing like in Werewolf. In our playing of the game, I was the Undertaker which meant that I knew which character was executed the day before. I enjoyed this role, which is maybe why I liked the game so much, because I was on the good team (being on the evil team stresses me out) and because I gained information each night.

I think the hardest part of this game is knowing who to trust. Obviously, this is a part of all social deduction games, but it didn’t appear as much in Two Rooms and a Boom because we always showed everyone our team or in our specific playing of Werewolf both because I didn’t know many people yet and because I was on the werewolf team. But I think because I have made connections with people at this point in the semester I was more inclined to trust them. For example, I completely trusted the four people I was sitting near to be on the good team, so I was surprised when one of them turned out to be the demon. I think this problem of trusting people is also exacerbated by the fact that you can have private conversations with anyone in the game. In order for me to get people to trust me in these conversations I chose to tell them what my role was and what I learned during the night. So, because I wasn’t killed for telling someone on the evil team this information, I trusted them to be on the good team.

This relates to leadership in a similar way to the other social deduction games with the idea that people on a leadership team might have different goals with their organization. It was shown that not knowing those goals could lead to a worse outcome for either person and that the group in the majority may get what they want despite not being entirely right (if the evil team had the majority at the end the good team wouldn’t have stood a chance). I think this game also shows how much you have to trust other members of your team. Without that initial trust, the team may not get anything done and could end up destroying themselves in the process (if I had not trusted those people around me I wouldn’t have told them what I knew and some of the connections we drew that helped us win the game wouldn’t have happened).