Social deduction games for small groups

In a social deduction game, a few players know a secret and the rest don't. The ones in the know try to blend in. Everyone else tries to find them, and the only evidence is what people say and how they say it. There's no board to read. You read your friends' faces.

The genre runs on one setup: an informed minority against an uninformed majority. The minority knows exactly who's on which side. The majority has the numbers and the vote, and has to talk its way to the truth before it uses them.

Mafia is the ancestor. Dimitry Davidoff came up with it in 1986, as a psychology student at Moscow State University, and it spread from classrooms to dormitories and summer camps, and from there around the world.

The classic rules: a narrator deals secret roles. At night everyone closes their eyes, and the mafia silently choose someone to eliminate. By day, the town argues and votes someone out. The town wins by voting out every mafioso. The mafia win when they match the town in number.

In 1997, Andrew Plotkin gave the game a new theme. His argument was that a werewolf suits the part better than a gangster: a hidden enemy who looks like everyone else in daylight. He also suggested exactly two werewolves. Werewolf caught on at tech conferences, and today the two names mean more or less the same game.

• People get knocked out. Get voted out by day or killed in the night and you're done, which in a long game can mean half an hour of watching your friends play. Sometimes the first one out never got a word in.
• Someone has to narrate. The narrator runs the nights and days and doesn't get to play. In a big group that's fine, but with five people it's a fifth of the table.
• It needs a crowd. Six players is about the floor, and the classic game is built for around ten.
• The first vote is blind. On the first day nobody has said anything useful yet, so the first person voted out is often a guess.

Newer games keep the lying and drop the parts that hurt small groups.

• The Resistance (Don Eskridge, 2009). Spies hide inside a team that runs missions, and sabotage them in secret. It plays five to ten, and nobody is knocked out: everyone stays in until the end, with no game master.
• Spyfall (Alexandr Ushan, 2014). Everyone gets the same location card except the spy, who has to work out where you all are from your questions while you work out who doesn't know. It plays three to eight, and a round takes about ten minutes.
• One Night Ultimate Werewolf (Ted Alspach and Akihisa Okui, 2014). Werewolf squeezed into a single night and a single vote, so nobody sits out. It plays three to ten, and a free app can do the narrator's job.

What they share is a single vote instead of a slow knockout, and roles handed out by the game instead of by a person.

The Lobbyist takes the same idea and makes the secret an opinion. A question comes up with two sides. Everyone picks one in secret. Then one player, the Lobbyist, is told to argue the side they didn't pick, and the rest of you have to work out who doesn't mean it.

• Nobody is knocked out. Everyone plays every round, and a new Lobbyist is drawn at random each round, so it could be you twice in a row.
• There's no narrator. The phones deal the roles, count the votes and run the reveal.
• It plays 3 to 10. Three works, and at three one vote can decide a round. See party games for 3 people.
• The first vote isn't blind. Everyone argues before anyone votes, so there's always evidence. Reading it right is your problem.

Across about 3,000 rounds at real tables, the Lobbyist was caught 46% of the time and got away with it the rest. If you're the one lying, read the bluffing tips. If you're hunting, find out whether your friends can tell when you lie. The game runs in the phone's browser, so nobody installs anything. More games like it are in phone party games, and the rules are on how to play.