What Are Social Deduction Games?

Social Deduction games are games where you generally have two groups. One group is the “bad” group who are trying to complete some objective. Sabotage missions, kill the deputy, whatever it might be. The “good” group is trying to figure out who the “bad” group is and deal with them.

To expound on my issue, most games give you your rolls and then immediately, before anything else happens, you talk about who is good and bad. There is 0 information to go on, and unless someone is bad at lying. So, you spend a few minutes, do something that gives some information and repeat the process. But let’s stop on the negatives, what do I look for is a better question because I do have some I like.

What Do I Look For in a Social Deduction Game

1. Mechanics
2. Information
3. Theme

Mechanics

This might surprise some people to see the order of the list. When I do make these lists, I try and put the more important ones towards the front. And honestly, for social deduction, mechanics for me are very important. I talk about the blind guessing as a negative in the games. And with good mechanics, you don’t need to start out with that. It gives you some interesting things to think about. Some games give you a bunch to start with, and some games give you nothing, but having more than just guessing at the beginning is key for me.

Information

That first one ties into information. I don’t like games that just give you limited information. If in mafia Tony is killed and I know I’m not part of the mafia, that doesn’t help me narrow it down. It just means that Tony wasn’t. I want the information to be meaningful and to build over time. The longer a game or round goes, the more information I should have available to me. Not always making it easier but to at least make more informed decisions. Too many of these games provide double blind information which isn’t that useful.

Theme

Theme really does matter in these games too. Let’s just use an example for this one, spies trying to infiltrate and sabotage an evil corporation, cool theme. Avalon where some people are bad, way less cool. I love Arthurian legend games, Tainted Grail, but The Resistance Avalon is not nearly as good a theme as the regular Resistance has. Mechanics might be the same, but theme makes a difference.

Are All Criteria Equally Important?

For me, theme is probably the least important. If the game has good mechanics and information the theme matters a little bit less. Like I said, I really want more going on than just sitting around a table accusing people. If you give that to me in a package where it makes sense for mafia, monsters, or whatever it might be, I’m probably going to be fine with the theme.

Let’s Do An Example

So we’re going to go with one that I do like in Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. But let’s see why and how it meets my criteria.

Mechanics

The main mechanic of the game actually is just for one player, the forensic scientist. There has been a murder, as the name would suggest. And one player, the forensic scientist is sending up reports to help the detectives figure out the correct murder weapon and piece of evidence. They, however, are not allowed to speak, they just give out a clue that might be a location from a list of locations or the age of the victim.

Information

The clue giving works because with every new report the players get new information. However, the information isn’t always going to be ideal. The age of the victim, well, if they were killed with a school supply, that might help us. But it also might not be useful. And the forensic scientist doesn’t get to pick out which reports they send up, that is already determined. Plus the murder (and possibly accomplice) will use that information to try and throw all the investigators onto other weapons and evidence as they go. And everyone is doing that as more information comes out.

Theme

Solving a murder is a fun theme. Generally, though, I like that theme in deduction. Here it works well in social deduction because, well, there is an element of deduction worked into this as well. I don’t know that the theme is amazingly tied to the mechanics, but it’s one that sets up a fun scenario.

Maybe what I like is social deduction games that have a bit of deduction to them as well. But this one is really somewhat social as you try and read who might be lying. If people are directing away from a person what that might mean. So the social aspect around the table is important.

Will This Work For You?

Probably not. Why, because most people who really like social deduction games don’t care that the game aspect might be lacking slightly. They are there for the banter around the table. I don’t mind the banter around the table, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong has some amazing banter. I just want the banter to mean something. So, if you are like me where you don’t like most social deduction games, maybe checkout Deception: Murder in Hong Kong or Grimm Masquerade. But for a lot of gamers, things like The Resistance and Werewolf, and One Night Ultimate Vampire are going to be great games.

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There are two different types of deduction games, the first is based off of the game Clue, where you are trying to figure out who-done-it. It isn’t a particular person in the group, it is a part of the game that there is some character that has done something. You are then using logic and reasoning to determine and guess a result. This can be done in a number of different ways, it might be that you are using reasoning while looking at a card. Or it could be trying to acquire information that other people know as well. These games typically end when someone figures out the solution or everyone gets it wrong.

The other type is social deduction. Social deduction is where you are trying to find out about which players at the table are the “bad guys”. These games normally have some way for both sides to win. These sorts of games are based off of Mafia or Werewolf where some people are normal citizens who are trying to figure out who the Mafia or Werewolves are before all the normal citizens are killed. This sort of game originally had a moderator who would run the game as you’d have to close your eyes and have secret information as to who was going to be killed. This has been built up over time for additional difficulty and intrigue to the game versus primarily being a conversation around the table.

The first type is much more pure deduction because all the information you’d need to know is available. With social deduction because the players are the ones who are lying, or telling the truth, about their role, the information is going to be less perfect as you try and read the people in the room and determine who is on what team and who is trying to cause the group as a whole to lose. So depending on what your style is, more social or logical, that’ll help determine which one is better for you.

So, let’s talk about some of the games that fit into these genres.

Gateway Game:

The Resistance – In this game it’s a simple social deduction where you are going on missions. However, depending on the numbers of players, some of the players are spies from the evil organization who is trying to stop the resistance. If they go on a mission, they can cause it to fail. But if they aren’t careful how they do it, they can reveal who they are. And if they reveal who they are, or people at the table guess who they are, they won’t get sent on anymore missions, because no one trusts them, and then it’ll make it harder for the spies to be able to fail missions. So it’s a balancing act for the spies to fail missions covertly so it’s harder for it to be pin pointed to them. The game plays fast, and you can put some theme into what is basically voting on a team and then team doing the mission if you want. The game scales well as well and is enjoyable.

Medium Weight:

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong – This builds and I would say is kind of between the two games on my list. While Resistance is completely about the interactions and being able to guess and read the other players, this game still has hidden roles, one person is a murder and one is a witness, and you might have an accomplice and everyone else is investigators who are trying to solve a murder. To do that, the game runner, who has the role of the forensic scientist, is sending up reports. These reports are will give the investigators clues, like, the murder took place at a hospital, or the murder victim was old, things like that. And the investigators are trying to piece together these reports in such a way that they can figure out which of the murder weapons and clues left that the scene, in front of each player, make sense for the murder. The murder and the accomplice are trying to deflect or suggest things that keep suspicion off of themselves. While the witness is trying to quietly keep people on track, because if the murder is caught, the murder and accomplice still have a chance to take out the witness which then still gives them the win. This game has more moving parts to it, and while the Resistance builds with accusing people, from the start of the game, people are trying to puzzle out what it might be from the first report that is sent up. Plus, figuring out who the murder is, you might have it narrowed down, but you still have to get the combination right of weapon and clue.

Heavy Weight:

Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game – Now, this one is the first of the deduction Clue style games where the information is out there, it’s just if you can piece it together. This is a big box game that takes you through a series of cards, based off of how you as a group want to investigate and you are trying to get through five different cases. There are expansions that add more cases. You, and your fellow players, then will spend your time carefully investigating a case, talking to witnesses, digging through evidence, and going through the games online database. And the cases can be very different from working a cold case to finding evidence of people being framed, to a kidnapping. And they can do a whole lot more. I really love how this game blends the digital portion where you are using a database they’ve created for the game, looking up real events and history, as well reading the story off of the cards. There is so much to dig through, and in the end, you are answering the best that you can. And then the cases build off of each other as well, which makes it even more fun. It’s a bigger and heavier game and you won’t be able to solve the cases perfectly just because there isn’t enough time, but I highly recommend this if you’re looking for a meatier deduction game.

Do you like deduction games? Have you played Clue or games like Mafia? What are some of your favorite deduction games? There are a lot of good ones out there, and while I don’t love social deduction, I really love the more logical deduction games.

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***Disclaimer***
These rankings are the opinion of yours truly, and if you don’t like them, that’s okay. We all have different tastes in games and that is great. There are some games that I’ve only played as a demo, and I felt like I got enough of a feel to put them on the list, thanks GenCon for all the demos. These are living rankings so next year I’m sure that things will change, so I’ll probably be doing another one next year. Thanks to Board Game Geek for letting me enter/rate my collection and games I’ve played. Thanks to Pub Meeple for creating a tool that pulls in those games that I’ve rated and creating a ranking tool. Again, the numbers and names will be linked to Cool Stuff Inc and Amazon if you’re interested in the games.

10 – Deception: Murder in Hong Kong
I am not that much of a fan of hidden role games like Werewolf, Mafia, Secret Hitler. I don’t mind playing them, but for the most part, it feels like randomly guessing with no real information to go on. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is not like that. What makes this game seem different is that you have way more information to go on because of the role of the forensic scientist. They are handing up reports from the basement where they have their lab, unfortunately their reports are a bit generic. So you are having to guess a clue and murder weapon by the end of the game that the killer has in front of them. However, the murder has a an accomplice who is trying to help throw everyone off the trail, but without making it too obvious. Then there was a witness to the crime who wants to get people on the right track, they know who the murder is but not the clue and murder weapon, but not too obviously, because if the murder and accomplice can pin point the witness at the end of the game, they still win. The game is a ton of fun and it comes with a ton of different content. There is always a “How” and “Where” report that the forensic scientist sends up, but the rest of the reports can be the state of dress of the murder victim to being if there was noise made during the murder. It’s a really fun deduction game that has a ton of talking to it and people declaring that they couldn’t possibly be the murder. It’s a game that you generally sit down and play two or more times in a game night because it goes over so well, and it plays a large group.

9 – Clank! In! Space!
This one surprised me a little by being so high, but I do really enjoy the game. In Clank! In! Space!, you are racing around the spaceship of an evil alien overlord who has a ton of trophies in his compartments on the ship. And, as an adventurer, you want to liberate a trophy so that you can become famous. Now, you do this by building up a deck of cards that allows you to purchase better cards for the deck and move and fight things. Plus, you have to get a key code from the ship to be able to get into the trophy room. So there is a bunch going on in this game, but it’s basically a deck building game. What works well for me is that it has more going than that, and the clank mechanic. The clank mechanic is basically you making noise as you stumble around the ship trying to find your way to the treasures and this evil alien is paying attention to that. So you want to make as little noise as possible, because you make too much, he’ll get you and you’ll be out of the game. But if you don’t make much clank, you can possibly get in to the good treasure, but it also might take a lot longer and then there is a higher chance that your clank (cubes) will be drawn from a bag, the few that are put in there. The game has a nice push your luck element to go with the deck building aspect, and I basically always want to push my luck. The game also isn’t a serious game, the cards riff off of various sci-fi films, TV shows, and stories. I don’t know that this game would work with a more serious theme. It’s a bit longer of a game than some deck builders, but the rest of the game play doesn’t cause it to overstay it’s welcome.

8 – Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition
Yes, 2nd Edition is important here as that is the game with the app that allows you to play through the scenario without someone having to run the scenario. This is a Lovecraftian themed game where you take on the role of investigators in the 1920’s. You’re called to a mansion or some location to investigate something strange that is going on. And whatever it is, it’s strange. Maybe it’s a town that is controlled by deep ones, maybe it’s a ritual that is meant to summon an elder god, or maybe it’s time travel plus probably everything else mentioned. With the app, there are a lot of scenarios that you can play through, and because the app knows what expansions you have for the game, it can change up how the mansion you are exploring or whatever the location is, looks and move rooms around. In the game, you are fighting monsters, investigating the case, solving puzzle, and probably going insane. It’s like a lot of Fantasy Flight Games Lovecraftian games that way, but this game has so much to it that you feel like you can play a scenario a couple of times, and even if the overall story doesn’t change, your experience with it will. And with the app, there are a lot of scenarios, some that require expansions, and some that don’t. This game really gives you a nice feeling of tension as you have to balance investigating with fighting. The game is also nice, because it offers different scenarios of differing length, so if you want to play for an hour and a half, you can do that, but if you want to play a longer game, you can do that as well. I believe that the app even lets you save, though, I haven’t used that feature yet, because we’ve always played through a scenario. This game uses the app well in that it doesn’t take over the game, but it makes the game easier to play.

7 – XenoShyft: Onslaught
The highest deck building game on the list, XenoShyft is a deck building game that has more than just the deck building aspect. It is Starship Troopers the board game where you are on a mining planet dealing with a bug infestation. But the bugs aren’t little or medium sized cockroaches, these are giant bugs who are going to destroy your base. The base has more health with more players, but with more players, you are going to be dealing with more monsters in each wave. Each player has their own side of the base to defend. However, you can aid other people. So if I am in charge of the med bay, I can heal your troops, but I only have a limited number of cards, and each player can have up to four characters to defend their base per round, and there are four bugs coming to get them each round. While this game has a deck building aspect to it, I feel like it’s also just as much a tower defense game as you watch the bugs slowly whittle away the bases hit points. This game has a good amount of pressure to it, and while it feels like it shouldn’t be impossibly hard, I don’t have a high win percentage. In whatever player count you’re playing at, you feel like you never have enough things to deal with each players side of the base. And I really like challenging cooperative games. This game as a lot of things going for it, and the cooperative nature of the deck building and being able to build up your deck and what you are getting, but then being able to sh are that with others makes this game feel unique compared to most others.

6 – Arkham Horror: The Card Game
I really like my Lovecraft board games, and this one really has a lot of story to it. You take one or two characters on an adventure as you try and solve the weird things that are happening in your town. This game, I guess, could technically be consider a deck builder, but you build the deck prior to the actual game. But each investigator has a unique deck of items. So the waitress, she might have a knife or something like that, but she’s not going to be as well armed as the FBI agent. In this game, which is a living card game, you are playing as a character or two and using resources to get cards and abilities into play, discarding cards to help you make checks to fight a monster or to investigate and gather clues while you are watching the bad guys schemes also count up until the point where you might have lost the game. One of the cool things about this game is that you have the ability to upgrade your deck in between games. You get experience points that you can spend, so maybe you have a decent revolver that has four bullets, you can get a six shooter that has six bullets now to replace it, so you can use it longer (that is a made up example). Along with that, this is a living card game, what that means is that there are more scenarios that can be made, and it is just more cards that are added to your game. You can play the game multiple times, though, through a story because you have different choices you can make as a group, and you have to decide which one is better. I like this game solo and I like it two players as well. I think that the living card game aspect could be a barrier of entry for some people, but the games aren’t long and you don’t have to play more than the base game if you don’t want to. And I realized I forgot one thing, in this game, you are trying to defeat challenges with various skills, pretty normal stuff for all the Fantasy Flight Arkham games, but in this one, instead of rolling dice, you are pulling tokens from a bag that can modify your result. It’s a fun twist that works like a die roll, but if you want to play a story focused game, you can make the bag easier, less negative numbers, or if you want to change yourself, you can make it harder. That ability to scale difficulty is really fun and make plays seem different.

5 – T.I.M.E. Stories
And now for something completely different, though still story driven. In T.I.M.E. Stories you are from an agency that is worried about the time stream and what might be happening and how people can use it for evil (I suspect I’m actually a bad guy or at least my boss is). You play through different scenarios that challenge you to explore locations, find clues, and solve the mystery that is happening. To do that, your consciousness is sent back into a vessel which can and probably will die or you’ll run out of time. But the good thing is, you can be sent back again and your boss will only be somewhat mad at you. T.I.M.E. Stories is a really cool game where you get little hints, from time to time, of a story that is going on that’s larger. And all the scenarios I’ve played thus far have felt different. The first one we were trying to stop something from happening in an Asylum. The next one we were trying to rescue someone during a zombie outbreak, and the final one we were in an alternate dimension in a fantasy world. And there was way more stories and locations than that, that I haven’t played yet. This game, is so much fun, the downside is that you can’t replay it once you’ve solved it, at least not for a while. You’ll probably always generally remember the puzzles, but the scenarios aren’t too expensive, you can play with up to four people, and you get more playing time out of each scenario than you would watching a movie, or at least we have. There are red herrings in there too that make the game harder as you are racing against a clock, time track, to be able to get everything solved before time runs out, and generally you have to reset at least once. I love this game, and I have the next scenario waiting for me, just need to schedule a time to play it.

4 – Betrayal at House on the Hill
I’m going to have this game higher than a lot of people, because there are some issues with the game. Mainly, when reading through a scenario for the haunting, which is the second half of the game, the betrayer or the other group, might have some issues clearly understanding their goal. Or their goal might be super easy. But that’s just part of the game and actually feels fairly thematic when it’s easy or when it’s hard. In this game, you are a rag tag group of ghost hunters, or thrill seekers, or just there because some dared you to, or a creepy child, who are investigating a creepy haunted house. You are finding rooms, finding items in rooms, and dealing with the creepy things that are going on. Eventually, you’ll have found a number of omen cards and a roll will happen and you might have a haunt happen. If it doesn’t, you continue until the haunt does happen because someone has found an omen card and failed their roll. Then you look up a scenario based on the omen and the room it was found in, and you play through that as the second half of the game, each side with a semi secret way to win. This game just drips theme for me and while it can be a bit stressful being the betrayer figuring out what you need to do by yourself, the game generally works. Each haunt feels different, and that’s some of the reason it doesn’t always feel balanced. The fact that a haunt can happen early in the game as only a little bit of the house has been explore or late in the game after almost everything is found is fun as well. This is a really good horror themed game for me, though I know it won’t be for everyone. I’d recommend you give it a try and try to get immersed in the story and feeling of the game, versus seeing if everything is fair and balanced.

3 – Pandemic Legacy Season 1
It was going to be on the list, and I’ve loved my experience with the game. I won’t go into too much on how it works, but as a legacy game, you are finding out new bits of story, new mechanics, and tearing up things as you go along. Pandemic is a game where you are part of a team trying to cure diseases and uncover what is going on in the world because there are those diseases spreading. The game is a ton of fun, and I’ve played it through twice. The story is linear and simple, but there is enough to it that it’s compelling. It’s also compelling, because Pandemic isn’t that easy a game as a the base game, and Pandemic Legacy Season 1 isn’t that easy a game either, plus you soon have to start balancing new things against the normal win condition which is just curing all four diseases. When I played through it a second time, a few years later, I played it solo on Malts and Meeples and I certainly didn’t remember everything for the game, though, I remembered the big plot points fairly well, just not when they would come up in the game. Each character that is played has their own abilities and you can improve them as time goes on, but you can also lose them if they get stuck in too many bad situations. The game really works well, and now it’s come down in price some. If you haven’t played this game, I’d highly recommend it, because there was a reason it was #1 on Board Game Geek for a while.

2 – Blood Rage
Most of the games in my top 10 have some story driven aspect to it. This game does not. However, this game has so many cool things about it. It has a great Norse theme to it as you are a Viking clan who are fighting for control over Yggdrasil and other sections of the nine realms. You start out in each age by drafting cards that help you with your strategy. Maybe you look to upgrade your clan leader so that they are more powerful. Or maybe you make it so that you get more glory if your clan members die in battle. Maybe you focus on being strong in battle or recruiting monsters. The drafting part of the game, while quick, really helps shape how you play the game. Then you try and take over areas of the map in order to improve your abilities, such as action points so you can take more actions, how many points you get for winning a battle or how many troops you can have on the board. Once everyone is out of action points, one of the realms is lost and you start again. Blood Rage plays fairly quickly for a game with a lot of minis and a lot going on in it. And the game feels different each time you play, because the cards that you draft are going to change up your strategy, and if you go too much into one strategy in an early age, players can block you from that strategy in later ages. And if you can focus on a single strategy, it might allow you to win the game, but there isn’t a strategy that seems too much stronger, whether your are fighting or peaceful. This game is just a ton of fun to play, and I finally got a copy, because right now it’s hard to find.

1 – Gloomhaven
My #1 game matches up with Board Game Geeks #1 game overall. Gloomhaven is a massive dungeon crawl game where you and a group of adventurers go through and fight monsters trying to figure out what is happening in the city of Gloomhaven and the lands surrounding it. This game is so much fun, because it’s a massive campaign game that has some legacy style aspects to it, mainly putting stickers on cards to improve them, but you can play it again completely. The combat and movement in this game are fun as well, as you play cards, picking them based on abilities, but also number at the top of one of them, because that determines how fast you act, and possibly if you are ahead of the monsters. Plus, with that, you get experience points which allows you to put in better cards, but the higher level you get and the better cards you have in there, the harder that the monsters get as well. You also have a goal that your character is going for, both overall and in each scenario. The scenario ones help you improve your character even more, but the overall one, that one causes you to retire and unlock a new character. Then you get to pick from all the unlocked characters and join the party again as a new character. There are a ton of scenarios in the game, as I’ve been playing it with a group of three of us and it’s taken us playing almost every other week for three hours in an evening, and it’s almost been two years. The game is amazing, it’s massive, and I think it’s going to scratch the itch for ameritrash players because it is so story driven, but the combat actually has a bit of a more strategic feel because you are playing cards and modifying with more cards, so it’s less random than rolling dice. I also think that, even though Gloomhaven is a massive game, it’s pretty straight forward once you have a few core concepts down, so while it might be intimidating to start, if you have someone who knows the game well, I think that more casual gamers would be able to join in the game and have a blast. This was an easy #1 game for me and as I was sorting I knew there wasn’t a chance anything would be higher.

So there it is, my top 100 games. I know that I’ve played a game since this started or since they were ranked that would probably be on the list. So this is definitely a living list. Thanks for coming along on this ride with me.

Let me know what games in the top 10 and top 100 look cool to you. Are there any that you love as well or love more than I do? Are there any that you really want to try?

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So, what is this type of game?

These games have someone(s) who is actively working against the party.  However, no one knows for sure, besides the person/people who are it, who the other people are. You are trying to figure out through the game play but also through conversation and peoples actions who might be working against the teams. These games tend to be more about the social interaction than about the game play itself.

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

In Deception, we are a group of detectives working with our forensic scientist to figure out the who done it. However, it is one of us at the table who committed the murder. The only person who knows, besides the murderer and their accomplice is the forensic scientist, however, they can’t tell us what they know directly. They have to send us messages from the lab that might or might not be extremely useful in figuring out the crime. Through this series of clues the detectives discuss what possible combinations of clues and murder weapons who is the murderer.

Secret Hitler

Secret Hitler revolves around setting up and enacting policies either that are fascist or liberal policies. One player per round is the president and another is the chancellor. The president nominates a chancellor and everyone votes on it. Then the president and chancellor get to enact a policy, but the president grabbing three policies off of the top of a policy pile, picking two, passing them on the chancellor and the chancellor enacting one of them. Through that, you can start to figure out who might be a fascist and who might be a liberal. If the liberals get all their agendas taken care of first, they win, so you can figure out who might be a fascist and avoid them. But you better not let Hitler become the Chancellor too late in the game, or the fascists might just win.

Donner Dinner Party

Lost in the woods it’s a bit snowy, but what could go wrong, there’s plenty of food in the woods, isn’t there? In this game you are part of the Donner Party stuck in the woods, most of you are respectable and wouldn’t consider eating the others in your party, but a few of your are cannibals. Each night you send out everyone into the woods to look for food and if you can come back with enough food, you survive another day. But if you don’t have enough food, someone gets eaten. Each person gets two cards while exploring the woods for food and gets to choose which one they are going to play. However, the party leader just gets a random card put in for them. So you can start to figure out who might be putting in cards that aren’t helping the party, but you don’t want to make it too obvious.

The Resistance 

It’s the future and evil corporation has taken over the rule of the world. You are part of the Resistance and are going on missions against the corporation. However, your group has been infiltrated, so each time you go out, you have to put a team together and vote on that team. If the team passes, they get to go out and either help the mission succeed or someone can cause the mission to fail however, you don’t know who on the team. So accusations are flying around as you try and complete enough missions, before too many are failed.

So you’ve seen how these different games work, let’s watch them continue to duke it out.

Similarities/Differences

Well, there are a lot of similarities, they are all based off of the game Mafia or Werewolf, so can probably pull all of these games out with the same group and play them all easily. However, I would say that Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is the most complex out of all of these games with the role of forensic scientist really really helping to create the story. The Resistance is by far the most simple so there’s a wide balance on the list, and it unintentionally went from the most complex to the least complex. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong also has the unique aspect of having the forensic scientist who has a fairly different role from everyone else since they know who is the murder.

The Results

I’m going to start off by just eliminating The Resistance. They are the light weight in a match full of heavier weight social deduction games. The Resistance isn’t a bad game, it’s just fairly simple in it’s mechanics. There are some pretty basic strategy that goes into it, like the first mission should always pass so that the infiltrators don’t tip their hand too early. Like Werewolf, which I’ve mentioned in passing, it’s a pretty good introduction to social deduction games, it just doesn’t hold up too well.

Next getting eliminated from the match is The Donner Dinner Party. In the Donner Dinner Party, the game is just a bit too random. With the leader putting in something blind and the fact that you could just end up with poison and a cure of poison in your hand as a good player instead of any food means that you could just be short food no matter what. It seemed a little heavily weighted towards the cannibals.

The final two are Secret Hitler and Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. I think that both of these are very good games, but we can only have one winner.

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

Secret Hitler loses points because it has a bit of the same issues that The Donner Dinner Party does, it’s weighted slightly towards the fascists, but it is less so. Also, it’s a theme that isn’t going to work at every table as well as Deception will. For good reason, it’s going to rub some people the wrong way, it can also lead towards more political discussion at the table, which can be a bummer on a game night depending on your group as it can kill a lot of the fun. However, with the right group, and if they don’t treat it seriously at all, the game can work quite well.

However, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is just so clever. The Forensic Scientist really gets a chance to craft that story of what happened in the murder and it has a great puzzle aspect to look at as well as you try and figure out if the information you’re getting from the scientist is for the clue or the murder weapon. And as the scientist it’s cool to see people figuring out the clue and then to rough when the murderer or accomplice is able to move the focus from the actual thing onto something else and the witness tries to subtly move it back in the right direction but doing so without being too obvious so they don’t get caught by the murderer. Obviously, this also has a heavier theme, but when the murder weapon can be a shark with a laser on it (I believe that’s a promo card), the game can be pretty silly.

What’s your favorite hidden role game? Have you played these ones before, do you agree with the winner?

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