10 Best Social Deduction Board Games that make great excuses to lie to your friends

I always have a great time playing social deduction games with my friends, as it gives me a great excuse to lie to their faces and laugh at them when they find out. Here is a great list of social deduction games that you have to try next.

Traitors Aboard

Traitors Aboard is a great social deduction game that pits pirates against mutineers. With the pirates trying to stock up as much treasure as possible and the secret mutineers sabotaging the efforts, players will have to lie and explain their way through their actions so they aren’t forced to walk the plank.

Interestingly, with Traitors Aboard, one of the pirate players, at any point, can look through the face-down pile of treasure that the players have been playing into. If there is enough Gold in there, the Pirates win. Otherwise, the Mutineers win, as they’ve decreased the value of the chest enough.

Special cards can be played that will give pirates clues and help mutineers maintain their cover. Traitors Aboard isn’t a long game, either, allowing for repeated games of piratical gaslighting.

The Resistance Avalon

The Resistance: Avalon is a social deduction game that gets recommended to no end. It’s widely popular thanks to its atypical starting ritual where one of the “good guys,” Merlin, knows who all of the bad guys are. However, should Merlin be found out, the good guys will lose.

Giddy tension always follows the beginning of The Resistance: Avalon, although it will turn into desperate pleading and strained convincing as players try to form teams to embark on quests, where, naturally, the evil players will try to sabotage their efforts.

I’d say that The Resistance: Avalon is a must-try. Its simplicity, combined with its depth, makes it a compelling fairy tale every time you get it out to play.

Blood on the Clocktower

Blood on the Clocktower is an incredibly rich narrative experience presented as a masterful social deduction game. There are many roles and teams, and unlike other similar Werewolf-adjacent games, the storyteller is deeply embroiled in the game and acts as both a Game Master and a player.

Likely the best part about Blood on the Clocktower is that negotiations aren’t exclusively short and public like with other similar titles. Players can go off and have private chats and talk in small groups, and everyone reconvenes at the night phase, where votes are cast to execute a player.

The evil team will always have a Demon that can kill a good player every night. The evil team wants to kill the good folk, and the good players want to kill the demon, although that isn’t always as straightforward as it seems. Blood on the Clocktower can host up to 20 players, and there are particular narrative “scripts” that provide unforgettable gaming experiences.

Unfathomable

Unfathomable is a special social deduction game as it plays mostly like a proper board game that isn’t just about figuring out who’s who. With the social deduction being one part of the game and not the main focus, you’re forced to thoroughly work with everyone to try and keep the ship afloat and the monsters at bay, unless you side with the Deep Ones, of course.

In Unfathomable, players will receive loyalty cards telling them which side they’re on. The humans will have to try to keep fixing the ship and fighting monsters whilst sailing the ship and performing rituals to keep the monsters at bay. The Deep One players will be trying to sabotage efforts.

Unfathomable can end for a variety of reasons, such as a ship resource running out, meaning the humans have a tall order on their hands. It’s thrilling, engaging, and has some incredible miniatures.

Coup

Coup is a social deduction game that may have roles assigned to players, but that doesn’t mean they have to stick to them. Each player will be trying to knock other players out of the game and gain influence by performing actions exclusive to a role. However, what’s stopping you from lying?

In Coup, players can challenge other players when they perform an action of a role. There are consequences for either play should a challenge pass or fail, meaning it’s unwise to challenge everyone’s actions.

As everyone lies and cheats their way through Coup, the victorious player will be the one who can plan their lies the best.

Two Rooms and a Boom

Two Rooms and a Boom is a pretty large social deduction game for a bigger group of players, but it’s the most involved. Players will split into two different groups, each with their secret role. One group will have the president, and another will have a bomber.

Before the timer runs out, both groups will have to exchange hostages and hope they haven’t grouped the president with the bomber. During the conversation phase, players must talk to each other, find other teammates, and prove loyalties by showing their role cards. It’s an extremely political game that puts players right into the hot seats of social deduction.

Two Rooms and a Boom is best played with larger group counts, making it less accessible to some interested groups.

Mantis Falls

Mantis Falls is like the Schrödinger’s Cat of board games, for it is either a cooperative or competitive board game with two players, but the witness players will never know for sure.

This is a two to three-player game that has two witness roles and one assassin role. As these get divided up, in a two-player game, you’ll either have two witnesses who don’t trust each other and need to work together to escape Mantis Falls or one witness being hunted by an assassin. The witness will never know for sure.

Incredibly innovative and bursting with secrets and ambiguity, Mantis Falls provides an utterly unique experience that I previously thought impossible. A cooperative social deduction game is simply unheard of.

Deception Murder in Hong Kong

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is a murder mystery social deduction game that also includes the game master as an integral player trying to help the detectives. At the beginning of the game, the murderer will point out the murder weapon and clue to the Forensic Scientist (game master), and the game will begin.

This game has the Forensic Scientist only communicating with bullet miniatures to highlight specific terms on tall tablets that should vaguely relate to both the means and clue of the murder. The investigators will have to tie together the vague hints to draw connections between the items to identify not only the murderer but how they did it.

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong employs a genius method of communication that has every player inferencing one player’s vague hints to figure out the story the Forensic Scientist is trying to display that relates to the murder.

Secret Hitler

Secret Hitler is my favorite social deduction game, for every round invites tense explanations, backpedaling, and a series of denials. “I had no choice!” and “Yes you did!” will be the primary focal points every time someone places a Fascist policy on the track. It’s hilarious.

In Secret Hitler, a genius turn order is used that rotates the president, who then chooses a chancellor. The president will pick three policies, either liberal or fascist, and will pass two onto the chancellor, who then plays one. Before this happens, the group must vote on that government. It’s always tense and exciting to see the chancellor’s office being passed around.

With bonuses for playing Fascist policies, even liberal players may get tempted into the dark side. A fast-paced song of policies and assassinations, Secret Hitler provides a blast of a time every time it’s played.

A Fake Artist Goes to New York

A Fake Artist goes to New York is a rare case of light and breezy fun that’s both incredibly engaging and endlessly fun. Every player but one will have a prompt to draw, and the “fake artist” will have to produce a drawing on the theme with only the other players’ in-progress drawings as a reference.

As you act like you know what you’re doing, you must mask any perceived mistakes and try not to make any definitive markings unless you’re sure it ties into the theme. If you get outed as being the fake artist, then you better have a pretty good idea of what the theme is.

What’s even better about A Fake Artist Goes to New York is that the game is so simple that it can be replicated without buying the game. However, it provides its own little papers that will form a gallery of all the previous games played.

With all of these fantastic social deduction games, all you’ve got to do now is choose the one in which you’ll enjoy lying to your friends the most.

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