Trouble Brewing (October 2019, Game 1) | Blood on the Clocktower
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- čas přidán 17. 02. 2020
- This is a full play-through of a 7-player game of Blood on the Clocktower. The script being used is Trouble Brewing, the first script in the base collection of Blood on the Clocktower. You can find the Trouble Brewing character sheet here: rebrand.ly/TBscript
Storyteller for this game: Jon Gjengset
Filming by Underrated Media Productions - / underratedmediaproduct...
Editing by Harrison Woodhead - www.harrisonwoodhead.com/ - Hry
Honestly the "no rolls barred" format of this game might be kind of ideal?
It's really great how they regularly sequester into separate rooms where people can talk openly.
I've been searching for literal hours trying to work out how this game could be played in person. I think I might prefer the online version.
Or to make it in person - literally going to other places in a house (probably not feasible in most situations)
When We ran an in person game, it was as close to NRB games by having people go to other rooms/areas and ST walk around. When it was time to vote, ST sent a group message to everyone calling to return. Whenever someone wanted to request a talk, it was also into a group text for visibility. Worked really well for days, nights we had to do it as normal silent nights (tried sending people to other rooms to speak at night, but was too much obvious movements)
Also threw around the idea of a "don't get got" style, where 1 game runs throughout the event, with nights being called every so often. This would let people naturally walk around and speak
Nice game, I feel like it may have been a little easy for the evil team when the washerwoman got false info, but I guess Zach got lucky with bluffing Soldier beforehand and not killing the ravenkeeper.
Jordan played such a strong minion game too, spy seems to be a very powerful role.
Hey Arkla, this is Evin here (the unfortunate Virgin). I had to watch my own loss over and over again in the editing process, and one tragic detail I noticed was that while I was running around having my private conversations with everyone, as there aren't a lot of reasons not to reveal a role to a confirmed Virgin, Nicole went over and spoke with Zach *right* before I got to him. I think that conversation went more along the lines of Nicole asking "Are you the Soldier?", which he was able to easily lean into, whereas if I'd gotten there just a moment sooner I would have been asking what his role was more directly - he might still have chosen 'Soldier', but there's a higher chance that he would have chosen one of his other two bluffs and we would have recognised the Washerwoman's false info. So close!
@@BloodontheClocktower Didn't Nicole say in the game that Zach told her that he was the Soldier before she said anything? And he told Reggie that he was the Soldier prior to Nicole's information being shared. Seemed to be a pretty lucky bluff that was corroborated by the little information that was in the game for good (minus the fact that there was always a death each night). The random Chef bluff at the beginning might have pushed Zach towards the Soldier bluff as well :P
@@codyy2236 Yep, I missed this one in the editing process. All credit back to Nicole. :)
- Evin
I love these gameplay videos, they really help with the wait for the game. Thanks for posting :)
Great game! I love watching playthroughs. I hope the fact it is titled 'game 1' that there might be some more to come soon. I like Jon's imaginative death descriptions. I think the Soldier is one of the easiest bluffs for the evil team and I am particularly paranoid when players say they are the Soldier, but it is so easy to get sidetracked with all the other information/misinformation going around.
That was awesome! I especially liked Jons quip of coming out as the storyteller :D (28:50)
Yeah, and him saying "I am starting to think that there might be an Imp in the game!". I pretty liked the cheese jokes though as well. Maybe I'm simple but those kind of things still get me every time
I'm so happy to see another play-through! This was a great game, too. Really good spy play. I am rather addicted to this game (as much as one can be addicted to something they haven't even tried yet) and can't wait until I can play it with my friends. I'm excited to see more!
Oh yeah, Jordan did a tops job as the Spy.
I've had the great fortune of playing it and in my view it definitely lives up to expectations.
thank you for the video, it was very useful for beginners to understand the game AND very untertaining to watch!
Damn the good team getting almost no useful info was brutal
What?
There's already a spy in a 7 player game and you give bad info to the washerwoman trying to confirm the spy's identity if he ever bluffed as a soldier.
Very slim chances for the good team to win with this script I think.
Also, not sure why the townsfolk nominated anyone on the first day.
The imp might have gone for the mayor if she was kept alive and the kill might have bounced to the ravenkeeper to keep the game balanced.
@blood on the clocktower please put up few videos of BMR games.
Thanks!
Hey thanks Abhinav. We're holding off on more play-throughs until the game is delivered, but we plan to get to more live videos after that point and we'll definitely have more Bad Moon Rising. In the meantime, we're currently streaming online games regularly: www.twitch.tv/thepandemoniuminstitute
- Evin
Jon literally states to the camera that he was trying to test out a difficult game for this playtest. Go to 6:23.
It's completely fine everyone agrees he was easy on the Evil team here.
Too many Chefs, tooo many chefs
Hmmm not sure how I feel about the virgin being able to execute themself with their own ability. Here, the storyteller was trying to set up a chance for the spy to abuse the virgin's ability to "confirm" himself as town, but Evin denied any possibility of that by executing himself before anyone could react.
Seems to me that what makes the virgin fun is that they have the chance to confirm themself another townsfolk, but if they come out too early they risk the possibility of an evil stepping in to nominate the virgin first-thereby denying any possibility of confirming another townsfolk and leaving the other players to wonder whether that player was really evil, or if the virgin was drunk/poisoned.
As Evin admits himself in the video, the virgin being able to execute themself completely sidesteps all of that. Instead, the virgin gets to prove to everyone that he is a townsfolk and confirm that they aren't drunk or poisoned without any of the other players having a chance to stop him. This kind of strategy sort of takes away from what makes the virgin so interesting.
Hey Patrick, this is Evin here on the BOTC account (and the Virgin in this video).
One of the reasons that I like that the Virgin can die from nominating themselves is that it creates options. Each role in Clocktower is designed so that there's never one "optimal" way to play it. (The Saint, for example, offers two broad pathways: Claim early on that you are the Saint so that the town doesn't execute you and lose, or stay silent or lie about your role for a few days in the hopes that the demon kills you instead - each path comes with different risks and challenges.) Giving players multiple ways to play a role doesn't just make each role more interesting to be, it makes each role more bluffable by the Evil Team which further enriches the game overall. The Virgin being able to self-nominate comes with its own pros and cons, but it also comes with more bluffing options for the Evil Team. For example, if I'm a minion and I want to imply that I'm a Townsfolk that's drunk or poisoned, I have the option of pretending to self-nominate as the Virgin and having nothing happen (which is a great thing to do if there's a real drunk somewhere else, or a player currently affected by the poisoner, as if your bluff is believed then the Good Team will be more likely to trust the incorrect info of other players). The fun of the Virgin isn't just in finding a suitable person to nominate you (and trying to avoid an Evil player from doing so), but also in the Virgin deciding whether to accept the pros/cons of nominating themselves versus finding an appropriate suitor. I believe that difficult decisions are what makes a role fun and interesting.
In another post I went over me reasons for wanting to self-nominate in this video, which I'll copy/paste here now:
- My general directive before a filmed game to players is "Play to win at all times, but if you have a choice between the sensible option or the fun/unusual option, please consider the fun option." I wanted to self-nominate partially so that people watching the videos could see an unusual strategy in practice.
- I also believed that it was my best move at the time. When you self-nominate, you gain a few things and you lose a things. You can learn for sure if you were drunk or poisoned, which is great info for yourself. You have a stronger chance of getting a confirmed Virgin in the game, which is great. But you lose the opportunity for the Undertaker to read your nominator, which sucks. And you take out a confirmed Good player in the process, which means the demon won't have to waste a kill on you later in the game (or risk a coin-flip between them and another player on the final day if they don't).
- I was genuinely concerned, as I said in the game, that a minion was going to short circuit my nomination. I've even been in games where the Imp short-circuited my Virgin ability and then went on to win (whilst I cried the whole time that we needed to execute them).
The other thing to consider is that whilst the Storyteller set the game up so that there was a juicy option for the Spy to nominate the Virgin, the Storyteller can only affect so much in BOTC and often players will take your setups and take them in totally wild and new directions. This is just one of the joys of playing as Storyteller - seeing whether the players will engage with the roles you've put in there in the way you think they will, or whether they take it somewhere else entirely. I have a Trouble Brewing setup I like that works at seven players only - you should have the Imp, the Investigator, the Scarlet Woman, the Mayor, the Undertaker, the Virgin, and then the seventh role should probably be the Ravenkeeper, Empath, or Chef. At seven players, the Good Team typically gets a maximum of three executions, but if one of these is used by the Virgin's ability then they only get two, and so they must ask themselves by the end: Has the demon become one of the two players seen as the Scarlet Woman, or is the Imp still out there somewhere? I find that in this setup, they end up finding themselves in this conundrum roughly half the time, maybe a bit less, and the rest of the time they just do something completely different with it and we all have fun anyway. :)
I also recommend checking out the Virgin's entry in the BOTC wiki if you haven't already: bloodontheclocktower.com/wiki/Virgin
Evin really came across as the player in Pandemic that tells every other player what to do with their turns.
So, it seems like by giving the Washerwoman completely false information on Night 1 and then reinforcing it by giving the Imp a bluff that confirmed the Washerwoman's false info that Team Evil started the game at a tremendous advantage. Am I misreading this?
Hey Gersh, this is Evin here (the Virgin in this video) on the BOTC account. I'm obviously going to be engaging in a lot of Good Team apologetics here, but overall I don't think that the scenario was so insurmountable. To me, there were two places in this game where things could have gone very differently for the Good Team:
1) Nicole (the Washerwoman) spoke to Zach (the Imp) before I was able to get to him. As a confirmed Virgin I was speaking to every player in turn to learn their roles. If I'd spoken to Zach and asked "What's your role?" then there's a chance he still would have claimed Soldier, but there's a much higher chance that he would have bluffed one of his other two roles. After the Washerwoman's info came out, we would have learned that either the Washerwoman's info was wrong or that Nicole was lying. It's possible that Jordan could have stepped up and been like "I'm actually the real Soldier, and I was bluffing as the Empath to try and get the demon to attack me," but there aren't a lot of reasons to lie to a confirmed Virgin so the Good Team would have been able to smell something fishy anyway. However, Nicole got to him before I did and (I'm guessing) asked him outright if he was the Soldier, making it much easier for him to lean into that bluff and "confirm" his role via the Washerwoman.
2) Zach made a pretty counter-intuitive kill on the final night of the game. Reggie was by far the most suspicious-looking player to the Good Team at that point, and demons tend to keep these players alive because it makes them look even more suspicious and gets them executed instead of the demon. However, Zach had it in mind to throw *further* suspicion on Reggie by making it look like the Imp had targeted themselves to make a minion the Imp instead. It didn't have the intended response (it actually just made us all trust Reggie) but it was still a creative and counter-intuitive strategy that yielded massive unintentional benefits for the Evil Team. The only other living Good player to target was Jason, the Ravenkeeper, so that's likely who Zach would have targeted instead of Reggie, giving the Good Team both Undertaker info and Ravenkeeper info on the same night. Instead, we got neither. My guess is that this info would have been enough to lead us to the Imp. If Zach had done the typical "best practice" move of keeping the most suspicious player alive then it would have probably been ruinous for him, but his creative move kept him alive - just not in the way that he expected.
Also (and here come the actual apologetics) I cannot stress to you how much these games were affected by how much we were all exhausted from running games at a convention all weekend and then staying up past midnight to film more games. Everyone was at a pretty severe cognitive disadvantage, both in processing information and in expressing information, and this tends to give a bit of an advantage to the Evil Team in general. ;)
Hi Evin and thanks a bunch for your reply. I suppose my point was that this setup seemed both highly complex and weighted against Team Good. I feel like it was only the high experience level of all the players involved that made it competitive. It was a very interesting game to watch, but I feel like if that setup was tried with more inexperienced players, Evil would win 9 times out of 10. I'm thinking about these kinds of setup problems more as the delivery of the game gets nearer: I don't yet have a good sense for what role combinations and information/misinformation lead to a competitive game and what does not.
Evin: As an aside, I just noticed that at 28:01 I _believe_ Nicole is trying to say that Zach actually claimed Solider _before_ she said anything to him.
@@gershsgaming8673: Yes, this was intentionally set up as a more complex game as I say in the beginning, precisely because the players are relatively experienced. Now that said, I don't think it was that biased against Good - Evil also had a tricky path to follow. First, one of them needed to claim Soldier for the Washerwoman "confirmation" to work, but neither of them knew that. Second, the Demon had some dangerous targets, and would only know that if the Spy managed to communicate with them (which they did not). Had Zach accidentally killed the Mayor or the Ravenkeeper, the game would have turned out very differently. And thirdly, Good had some pretty strong information-gatherers that didn't actually provide any useful info (Undertaker, Virgin, and Ravenkeeper) to their detriment. This is one issue with the Virgin self-nomination.
@@jonhoo Ah right I totally missed that from Nicole in the editing process. All credit back to Nicole here.
- Evin
Zach is a baller GG
Can we get any information on a release date? Or a day for extra content to come out.
Hi Gnostic, this is Evin here. The latest information on the delivery date for Blood on the Clocktower is in the January Kickstarter update. The current projected pre-production/production timeline takes us to late August.
Link here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/pandemoniuminstitute/blood-on-the-clocktower/posts/2732138
Late august 2024
I'm just here for the cheese jokes.
All that talk at the start tells people who are not certain roles. I’ve never seen a bluffer able to talk and concentrate at the same time
Happy 7000th view
I still don't understand how the Washerwoman gets false information; there's no Drunk/Poisoned in play and regardless of what Bluffs the Demon has their actual characters remain the same. Did the rules on this get revised since then or it's Story teller discretion?
The Spy can register as any Townsfolk or Outsider based on Storyteller's decision. The Washerwoman got "correct" information that the Spy was incorrectly showing up as a Soldier.
I feel like the spy's grimoire knowledge (updated every night if they are alive) is already incredibly powerful, so I use their might register as townsfolk sparingly. Every storyteller has their own style, but I would never have gone for this.
@@Hugh.ManateeAgreed. A sober washerwoman shouldn’t confirm a demon’s bluff, even with a spy in play. Spy’s town register ability should be used sparingly.
Unfortuntately I think two people were confirmed "not awake during the night" because of all the dead jokes and giggling.
Reggie woke while talking
I can see why Evin and Reggie wanted to execute Meg. Meg's always evil.
Any chance of this game ever actually coming out??
Yes.
@@BloodontheClocktower Is there tho?
Zach is really cute
Thanks
(Spoilers) In my opinion, this was a pretty bad game. The Storyteller stacked the deck for the evil team by giving the washerwoman false info on the two evil players, players who knew what roles were in play (Spy) and what roles were not (the three cards). This made it easy to let either of them bluff as that role, especially when she straight up asked them "Are you this role?". I also just really dislike the confirmed virgin play as it always seems to hurt the good team for no reason. It is good that the game makes dead players not useless, but this play takes out two good players in one night (the execution plus the demon kill) when there are only five to start with. Plus, as seen in this game, it didn't even accomplish what it is supposed to do as the virgin then purposefully got good players killed to accidentally help the minion. Overall just a pretty miserable and confusing watch .
I agree with your first point, but the virgin was very powerful for the good team and was the only thing that gave them a chance at winning
@@doity I think that Vergin play was bad it seemed like there was not a baron. so it blocked the spy but accomplished little else. They could confirm a good player and soft confirm another one but they didn't they
@@imcoral Town should have been stronger and the best way to do that is to lose the raven keeper which is worthless in a spy game. and add one more night of info top 4 or FT or Empath
To be fair, it was pretty lucky from Zach to actually claim soldier by chance instead of one of the other rules. What I actually didn't like much from the storyteller was that his banter with the players was distracting.
I didn't think it was the storytellers fault, rather Evin did not play well. There was really no good reason to go after Reggie or Meg, also he revealed who was the mayor to everyone