8 Best Social Deception Games Every Traitors Fan Must Play
Someone you trust is lying
Who do you trust when anyone in the room could be lying? The Traitors TV show built an entire franchise around this question. This week, 22 more people have to answer it. The Traitors: New Blood premieres Thursday, Sept. 17 on NBC. This season swaps out the franchise’s usual cluster of celebrities for a civilian cast, but it foregrounds the same core questions: Who in this group is lying to your face? How long before you figure it out? Will you trust the wrong person? Will you find that out only after it’s too late to matter?
Video games have been running this exact experiment for many years. These are the eight worth playing if you can’t get enough of The Traitors this season.
8 Town of Salem
Why nobody’s safe here: The Jailor can lock you up and interrogate you before you even get a turn to lie your way out.
Town of Salem, a free-to-play browser and mobile game, drops you directly into a small town bustling with colonists. When each round begins, you’re assigned a role at random, and you play as that colonist for the match. There are about 30 possible roles, including ones like Werewolf, Serial Killer, or Sheriff. Each round runs on a strict day-night cycle: Talk and vote during the day, and act in secret at night. Each role has specific actions that could help you collectively find the killer; but it may not be in your best interest to divulge who you are. Fair warning — whether you betray your lobby or try to work together, the sheer number of available roles means things are going to be complicated, no matter what.
7 Goose Goose Duck
Why nobody’s safe here: There’s a vulture happily dragging bodies off to its own private nest.
What if a game like Among Us featured a bunch of fowl up to, uh, foul deeds? Goose Goose Duck is a free multiplayer party game playable on PC, mobile, and in-browser. In it, you control a goose — or, if you’re the traitor, a duck in disguise — wandering around a barn, manor, or campsite. You’re completing various chores while the ducks in the party perform sabotage from the inside. There are over 20 roles you can play here, selected at random — from an amnesiac who forgets their own alignment mid-game to a vulture that drags bodies off to a hidden nest. All of this is playing out in a cartoon art style and with honking audio cues that make the game seem harmless, when it’s truly anything but.
6 Project Winter
Why nobody’s safe here: Nobody needs to actively be hunting you. The cold will take care of that.
Project Winter is a PC and console survival game for up to eight players. You and your seven fellow survivors control stranded travelers trying to get off a snowy mountain before you freeze, starve, or get murdered by one of your own party. Most of the players are survivors, working together to accomplish shared goals like chopping wood, hunting food, or repairing a radio tower. That’s lovely, and makes it seem like you might possibly live to see another day…except for the fact that there are also hidden traitors sabotaging your supplies and picking off innocent survivors one at a time. Every decision you make about who to share supplies with, who to trust near a fire, who to theorize with or protect yourself from — all of these decisions come down to whether someone wants you dead before the rescue helicopter lands.
5 Deceit
Why nobody’s safe here: One touch turns you into the thing everyone else is hunting.
In Deceit — a first-person, multiplayer PC game — you play as one of six people trapped inside a dungeon-like facility with no memory of how you got there. Two of you have already been secretly infected with a virus that spreads on contact and turns anyone it touches into another Infected. The Infected win by spreading their infection to the whole group before a single person escapes. Everyone else wins by finding and stopping the Infected, first. Usually with whatever crossbow, trap, or blunt object that happens to be nearby.
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4 Werewolves Within
Why nobody’s safe here: Your own face can give you away, even when you've decided to lie.
Werewolves Within is a VR game, compatible with the original PlayStation VR (but not PSVR 2!) and Oculus Rift. In Werewolves Within, you and your fellow investigators are villagers by day and werewolves picking people off by night. The twist for this game lies in its face and hand movement tracking: Since the VR headsets have that information, the game uses it…usually to your disadvantage. The tells that tend to get lost over voice chat or text — think: A flinch, a too-long pause, an avoided glance — are right there, in-game, for everyone else to read. While text-based deduction lets you compose yourself between messages, VR and Werewolves Within don’t give you that break. Try to remember what your face and hands are doing at all times (while you’re under intense scrutiny and pressure). Good luck!
3 Space Station 13
Why nobody’s safe here: Everyone clocked in for the same shift. Only one of them has a second job.
Ever wanted to work on a space station? Potential betrayal aside? Here’s your game: Space Station 13 is a free, browser-based multiplayer sim where dozens of players log in as staff on a working space station. Each gets assigned a job — engineer, doctor, security officer, botanist, chef — with tasks they need to complete before the end of their shift. One or more players get a secret second job, like being a Syndicate agent working sabotage or scheming an assassination from the inside. Space Station 13 is an older game — it came out in 2003 — but people are still playing it today because it inspired entire communities with distinct gameplay rules, game modes, and custom codebases…making a two-decade-old game feel surprisingly fresh and constantly replayable.
2 Secret Neighbor
Why nobody’s safe here: One of your fellow kids is not a fellow kid
What about a true horror take on the familiar social deduction game formula? Secret Neighbor is a multiplayer horror game for PC and console. In it, you play as one of a group of kids sneaking into a neighbor’s house to rescue a friend locked in the basement. As you and the other children search for various keys and clues, one member of the group is the menacing Neighbor in disguise working hard to slow the rescue by any means possible. Set in the same universe as the Hello Neighbor games, Secret Neighbor swaps the genre’s usual conversation-and-accusation loop for something closer to realizing, mid-search, that you’ve been standing next to the real threat the whole time.
1 Among Us
Why nobody’s safe here: You can be totally innocent and still end up stranded in deep space?!
Among Us is a multiplayer PC, console, and mobile game where you play as an innocent crewmate (or an insidious imposter) aboard a spaceship. As is the case with Space Station 13, you’ll be assigned a normal, necessary job to give you the cover of tackling basic chores — wiring, fuel, medbay scans — to keep the ship operational. Impostors fake their way through the same chores while killing crewmates in empty rooms, or by sneaking through vents between rounds. (It’s a lot to juggle — it’s hard work being an imposter!) The group stops for emergency meetings to argue about who’s lying, vote someone out, and find out immediately whether they got it right or just ejected an innocent crewmate into space.
Set the same basic premise on a spaceship, in a snowed-in survival camp, or in a Scottish mansion with Alan Cumming, and the central fear barely changes: Someone in your group — someone you trust, someone you’re working with toward a common goal — is lying. You won’t know who that is until it’s too late. The 22 people walking into this season of The Traitors are about to learn what these types of games teach: Knowing the traitor is out there doesn’t actually help you spot them — at all.