The Traitors is over for now and all we can do is wait patiently for series three, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept a deficit of deceit in your life. The hit BBC show is a loose adaptation of the classic party game Mafia – also known as Werewolf – and if you want to stage your own Traitors-style evening, there’s a plethora of options to pick from.
The original
Mafia, eight to 24 players, 60 minutes
You can’t beat the price of this classic. The original game of Mafia – or Werewolf, as it’s also known – is attributed to Russian designer Dimitry Davidoff, who invented it at university in Moscow in the 1980s. Davidoff’s version spread through word of mouth, being reworked into the Werewolf version in 1997. The rules will be instantly recognisable to fans of The Traitors: a small number of “mafiosi”, or “werewolves”, secretly plot by night to kill the neutral villagers by day, and in return the villagers exile one of their own each day to try to cleanse themselves of malign influence.
As a folk game, there are untold variations: a “seer” might be allowed to ask what team someone is on each night or a “doctor” might protect someone from a night-time attack. Boxed versions of the game, such as Ultimate Werewolf, can be helpful to guide players through fun ways to work in these extra roles.
The quick one
One Night Ultimate Werewolf, three to 10 players, 10 minutes
Mafia and Werewolf are meaty games that take a while to play, and require a dedicated player to run the evening. One Night Ultimate Werewolf is the opposite. Players are given their roles, use their individual abilities, and have an almighty row for five minutes before choosing someone to die and seeing whether they chose correctly.
This game, which has its spin-offs and expansions, is a good way to ease into the skill of lying to your friends and family. But the trade-off for speed is complexity: with the whole game compressed into 10 minutes, it’s not uncommon to get halfway into a round only for someone to admit they forgot to take a crucial step earlier on.
The trivia one
Insider, four to eight players, 15 minutes
A game of Mafia/Werewolf is effectively a big argument about one thing: who the secret villain is. With Insider, by contrast, the arguments can get a lot stranger. It is essentially a rapid-fire round of 20 questions: one player picks an object and the others try to guess what it is with simple yes/no questions. The twist? One of the other players is the “insider” and knows the right answer. They win if their team guesses the object correctly – but only if, at the end of a short discussion session, they don’t also guess who the insider was.
The game will lead to some of the weirdest arguments as you try desperately to convince your friends that your bizarre line of questioning around zoo animals was just good luck rather than insider knowledge.
The big one
Blood on the Clocktower, five to 20 players, 30-120 minutes
Blood on the Clocktower is the Ulysses of the board games world: massive, intimidating and beloved by its fans, even if they haven’t managed to finish it. The game plays like the original Mafia/Werewolf, with a dedicated games master running the players through multiple day/night cycles until the good guys or bad guys win. But the master is also an active part of the game, assigning players complex but fulfilling roles such as the “gossip”, whose words kill if they’re true, or the “drunk”, who thinks they’re another player entirely. Neither small nor cheap, it’s not an ideal introduction to board games, but it’s the one that will stick with you for the longest.
