I don't understand how this game gained so much popularity, because it's impossible to get any kind of reliable information in this game. For example, you have an ability that let's you ask the game master (in private) about whether one person is evil or not (their alliance). The game master is going to give you an answer, BUT it's possible that the answer is not the truth, because:

* you are drunk (which you don't know about)

* you were poisoned that night (which you don't know about)

* the target might be protected in some way (which you don't know about)

* some powers literally let the game master decide if they work or not (you will not be told it did not work)

Imagine the first few nights of mafia style games, where nobody knows anything, so everybody is just going on hunches and feelings. That's Blood on the clocktower for almost all the nights.

Clocktower is not meant to be a solvable game. In fact, solvability is a big problem in One Night. The most boring games of Clocktower are those where you can coldly logic everything out because there is No Other Way for things to have happened.

Clocktower is the ultimate iteration of a social deception game. It’s about the lying. It’s about the storytelling; not just by the storyteller but by the players themselves who have to create the alternative narratives and convince their friends of those narratives.

Clocktower is so good because it forces people to work together, and assume unreliable narrators regardless of intent. It gives individuals unique and powerful abilities, giving a lot of agency on the game regardless of whether they are dead or not. And because of all of this, it’s not the few but the many that achieve a success for their team.

I am utterly fascinated by this game and, more than that, thanks to its format, it yields a huge framework for experimentation by scriptwriters and storytellers. I have stopped playing any other kind of social deduction game - none can even hold a candle to Blood on the Clocktower.

I love it, at least with the right group, because while you basically never get reliable information, you do get a large amount of it. Some will be contradictory, some will match, most will need to be expanded on. You piece together narratives matching the evidence, poke holes in these narratives, offer alternative explanations, determine probabilities that multiple people are both speaking the truth. It's not that nobody knows anything, instead everyone knows something and will need to decide when and what to share with others. You might be able to get someone killed with a random accusation, but you're just as likely to reveal yourself to be a liar to someone in the process.

I've tried it a few times, but it's so much more complex that it really requires everyone who's playing to care deeply about reasoning through it. There's so little information that's public to everyone, so if even one player with a role that lets them get private information doesn't understand or communicate that well, the whole game can fall apart.