Social Deduction Games Need Good Players to Lie

The classic social deduction setup pits an informed “evil” minority against an uninformed “good” majority, challenging the good players to find the truth. Because they are at an information disadvantage, telling the truth tends to be the good team's default strategy. But this creates several problems:

• Truth-telling becomes a degenerate strategy, depriving good players of agency.
• Deception is fun, but good players cannot engage with that part of the game.
• Deductions don’t need to go any deeper than figuring out who is lying, since liars are presumed to be evil.

To address these issues, it is important to create incentives for good players to lie some of the time. There are two main ways to do this: hiding important information from the evil team or making players unsure which team they are on.

Let's first consider hiding information from the evil team. If the evil team knows everything, the good team has no reason to lie. However, the good team often has secret weapons to trick the evil players. In games where each player has a unique and secret role, a player’s role serves as a potential trap. If an evil player claims a good role, the true owner can reveal it to contradict them. This is common in One Night Ultimate Werewolf, where roles are known and players usually claim a role to avoid suspicion. Lying about your role as a good player, especially for roles like the Hunter that don’t mind being killed, can help catch evil players.

You can go further and add roles that demand secrecy, as Blood on the Clocktower does with many characters. For example, the Damsel must stay hidden and find a convincing lie as cover because if the evil team identifies the Damsel, they immediately win. Many roles, like the Sage or the Ravenkeeper, have abilities that trigger only if they fool the evil team into killing them, often by claiming other roles that receive useful information while alive. The variety of characters with different motivations for what information they want others to believe creates a deeper puzzle where players must look beyond whether someone is lying to understand why.

The second approach is to make players unsure of their own team. Even if telling the truth is always right for the good team, good players may hesitate if they aren’t sure whether they are evil. In One Night Ultimate Werewolf, a player’s role can change without their knowledge, potentially replacing a good role with an evil one. When characters like the Robber or the Troublemaker are in the game, players must be careful sharing information because it could be used against them if they have been switched. I remember a game where I identified a Werewolf as the Seer, only for the Troublemaker to reveal we had been swapped. It is impossible to defend yourself from your own testimony.

Creating uncertainty in teams is riskier than hiding information from the evil team because it deceives players about their own victory conditions. Discovering you have been working toward the wrong goal can feel very bad. It works well in One Night Ultimate Werewolf because the game is short, but it is not appropriate in longer games, though some still do this anyway. The most egregious example is Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game, where you can discover hours into the game that you are actually a Cylon.

Lying can be stressful, but it can also be a lot of fun. Finding motives for good players to lie adds interesting nuances to social deduction games. That said, you don’t want to go too far; if everybody is always lying about everything, then it becomes impossible to deduce anything. Including even one or two good roles that want to lie has a big impact on the game because it means all information must be taken with a grain of salt.