• Similarities
• Night and day phases
• Central person who operates the whole game and knows everything
• Secret things happen at night when everyone has their eyes closed
• Evil people find out who their partners are in the night (with the exception of the Imp in BOTC)
• Seer players that can look at other player’s cards or otherwise find out other player’s roles
• Roles that copy other roles- Doppelgänger in werewolf copies another card they look at, and the Drunk in BOTC believes that they are a different role than they are.
• The drunk role!!

• Differences
• Voting mechanism (pointing vs center person turning and raised hands)
• BOTC has many more roles, and is more complicated in general.
• BOTC can, and is supposed to take much longer than Werewolf
• In werewolf, when you are killed, your card is revealed. In BOTC your role stays hidden even after death
• When you are dead in werewolf you are essentially no longer in the game. When you are dead in BOTC you are still very much an active player (including dead votes)

I really like both of these games! I like that BOTC has much more fun mechanics, exciting new roles, cool art, and has a lot more different ways it can play out because of all the different roles. Werewolf, on the other hand, is much simpler and easy to manage. I like that it’s a lot more accessible than BOTC, I was very very confused the first time I played BOTC. I have fond memories of playing Werewolf when I was little, and I remember (and still do) thinking that the pointing mechanic is super fun, because in real life people aren’t so fond of the pointing.

I have to say, I think BOTC is my favorite, even if I am still learning the ins and outs of it. I think its much more playable for experienced players, and I think it would get even more fun every time you play. It has so many outcomes without the expansion packs needed for Werewolf! And I think the whole concept of the clocktower and all the clocktower mechanics are much cooler and more mature than Werewolf.

As an avid fan of social deduction games, Werewolf and Blood on the Clocktower were two of my favorite games that we played this semester. They’re both similar in some respects, but although some might consider Blood on the Clocktower to be a better version of Werewolf, I think that they both have their strengths and weaknesses. To start off with, they’re both hidden role social deduction games, that both have a day/night cycle, that both have different roles assigned to each player, and that both have a “good” and “evil” team. However, the main differences come from how Blood on the Clocktower’s Storyteller has an active role in keeping things “interesting”, how Blood on the Clocktower has everyone have a role that does something (as opposed to Werewolf’s villagers that don’t have abilities) and there isn’t a hard elimination; dead players in Blood on the Clocktower can still participate and influence the outcome of the game. 

While these elements for Blood on the Clocktower do make it more fun and engaging for the average player, since unlike in Werewolf there aren’t periods where you don’t have an ability and can’t do anything or are just dead and can’t do anything but spectate, I think the additional roles and the role of the Storyteller take away from the pure social deduction aspect. Both games focus a lot on deception and trying to find out people’s real roles, but Werewolf is very pure about this – people are who they claim they are, and there aren’t any neutral or muddy roles to confuse things. Blood on the Clocktower, however, has roles like the Poisoner or the Drunk where they might not even be aware that they’re not who they think they are, and while this element of obfuscation does make games more interesting, it does also put a hard cap on how much social role deduction one can do.

I also think that while the roles being able to interact past death and vote is really fun, it does also make it harder for certain victory conditions to be met because you can’t just eliminate someone who you suspect has problematic information. It causes the game to have less of a hard player elimination than Werewolf, which all comes down to the main difference between the two games: complexity. Werewolf (and Mafia and its derivatives) are really easy to play, and really just require some basic understanding and a bunch of people. Blood on the Clocktower has much more advanced and in-depth mechanics, and thus is more difficult to work through, and also does lean on the Storyteller being good at their jobs. I think they both cater to different audiences in the same niche, and while I think Blood on the Clocktower is the better game because you can do more with its more advanced roles and deeper mechanics, sometimes you do just want to play a quick fun game without having to set a bunch of things up for it.

Rosalind Wiseman: Respect Is Earned, and Dignity Is a Given

Rosalind Wiseman works with youth for a living, and is deemed an expert on the subject. Youth all over the world inspired her lecture I attended, about mean girl culture, its roots, its effects on our society and all of us individually, and how this all applies to our lives. Rosalind also advises us that youth and children need our own advocation and empathy, especially those in crisis but definitely also every single other kid- every one of us deserves to have a social emotional life, and struggles, and to talk to trusted adults about them!

Something Wiseman said that really stuck out to me was “People learn early that maintaining a relationship is more important than how you are treated in a relationship”. I was definitely sitting in the auditorium thinking about how I’ve lived my whole life thinking this way, to a certain degree. And hey, this might be my conditioning, but I do think maintaining relationships is important in most situations, but I also recognize and absolutely believe that if you are not receiving respect or being treated well in a relationship, you have every right to leave that relationship and maybe you should!!

Another key point in Wiseman’s lecture, talked about as well in the Q&A portion, was conflict resolution. Most of the time, when you’re attempting to maintain a relationship, or you are required to, you need to have conflict resolution skills. You need to be able to “acknowledge that conflicts are difficult, but normal, and can be worked through”. You can’t just walk around hurting your friends, coworkers, family members, any of their feelings, you need to make them feel valued and dignify them even in times of conflict. “Identify key moments to support them” even if you’re not on the same side of the issue yet, or even if you part ways on the opposing side. 

As this was a lecture titled “Mean girls”, a lot of Rosalind Wiseman’s advice mainly applied to how to work with women and girls, and how to deal with issues as a woman or a girl. Something she leveled with us about is that a lot of women act the way they do because they’re scared of what other people will think of them. Specifically other women and girls, their peers. This is a huge problem because “women showing anger and frustration are worried people will label them as mean”, so we are taught to be docile, and bottle all of our frustrations up. This goes hand in hand with the maintaining relationships aspect of Wiseman’s talk. Both of these issues teach people to avoid conflict at all costs, and not how to handle it properly.

The most important thing Wiseman talked about, and mentioned over and over again, was that every person deserves dignity. Young girls, old women, everyone, even the person you might have conflict with. She said “Respect is earned, dignity is a given. Dignity is non-negotiable”. As long as we live according to that principle, we are off to a good start in keeping long, healthy relationships in all aspects of our lives.