I’m spending a lot of my time on this hobby, so I thought I’d write up a quick description. I’m often in a hurry and summarize it as “Werewolf on Acid”. Here’s a little more detail.
Blood on the Clocktower
At the beginning of the game, each player gets a token with a role printed on it. You pick a role, look at it and hand it to the storyteller. You don’t show anyone your role.
How It’s Like Werewolf
Your role is either good or evil. Most players are good. One of the evil players is the demon. The evil team usually knows who they are. The good team usually doesn’t know.
There are day turns and night turns. Each day, the good players can nominate a player to execute and vote on that nomination. Each night, the demon chooses a good player to kill.
The good team wins if the demon gets executed. The evil team wins if there are two players left and one is the demon.
Where It Gets Weird
Every role has a special ability. The good team often has abilities that provide information, like the Empath who the storyteller tells each night how many of their neighbors are evil. The ability might be a material edge, like the Monk, who can protect one person every night. These roles with helpful abilities are Townsfolk.
There are also good players with inconvenient abilities called Outsiders. For instance, the Drunk thinks they’re a townsfolk, but their role doesn’t work. A drunk Empath would get frequently misleading information about how many of their neighbors are evil. A drunk Monk would think they were protecting people, but the people wouldn’t be protected.
The evil team has special abilities, too. The demon can kill someone each night and also gets “bluffs”, roles that the good team isn’t using this game. The other evil roles, called minions have abilities that make the good team’s life more difficult, like the Poisoner, who can make one good player’s ability malfunction for a turn.
Core Concepts
Almost Nothing You Know Is For Certain
Your townsfolk abilities tell you information, but you could be drunk. You could be poisoned. There are people who are good but seem evil and vice versa. Information is never absolute but only a clue.
Anyone Can Say Anything
A really frequent question is, “Can I tell people my role”. The first answer is, “not right away, but soon”. The storyteller collects the roles and has a few minutes of bookkeeping while they set up the game. When this is done, the storyteller will say, “I have been murdered in the night. It is now the first day.”
Now that it’s the first day, you can tell people your role. If you’re the Monk, you can say you’re the Monk, but
- The Monk is a favorite target of demon players.
- Anyone else can also say they’re the Monk.
Mostly, the good players want everyone to know what’s happening, and the evil players want to sow confusion. However, there are exceptions. There’s a good role, the Ravenkeeper whose power is activated by being killed by the demon. A Ravenkeeper might claim to be a Monk to tempt a demon to kill them.
Death Isn’t the End
In Blood on the Clocktower, most players get killed during most games. When your character is killed, you can still talk. You can still vote one more time (this is called the “ghost vote”).
Most powers stop working at death, but dead players are very much a part of the game. When a team wins, the players on that team win whether they’re alive or not.
Some Terms
StoryTeller
This is someone who knows everything that’s going on and decides what information to give. When drunk or poisoned characters get wrong information, the storyteller decides what wrong information they get.
At the end of the game, the storyteller describes what everyone’s roles were and summarizes everything that happened during the game. This is one of the best parts, because all the confusion during the game gets cleared up and all suspicions get confirmed.
The Grimoire
This is a thing the storyteller carries that contains all the information about the current state of the game. Typically, it looks like a big book with a fake inside which holds all the tokens.
Script
There are lots of roles, but only twenty or so are typically used during one game. A script is a list of roles during a game. A group will typically say, “Does everyone want to play Trouble Brewing?” and people agree on a script.
The examples in this description are all Trouble Brewing examples.
In Summary
The two big elements of the game are about logic and social deduction. You usually can’t win completely on logic. All the townsfolk powers together – in most cases in most scripts – won’t tell you absolutely who the demon is.
Oddly, the game seems to attract fairly shy people. I think people like having a framework to talk and even mock up conflict.
Almost everyone tends to find their first few games confusing. I suggest you just relax. Usually, nobody remembers who wins or who loses.
