Know Your Role

Right, yesterday I found myself playing Town of Salem, a game that’s actually about four years old now in various capacities but is in fact about to come to mobile next week and is currently on sale on Steam (although there’s a completely free to play browser version as well) so shut up it is still relevant.

It’s online Mafia/Werewolf basically – an informed minority vs an uninformed majority, the Town must try and get rid of the Mafia by lynching them during the day or killing them at night, each night the mafia (who know who each other are) kill townfolk and win if they have a majority. Add into the mix neutral characters who have their own set of win conditions (the Jester who wants to be lynched, the Serial Killer who wants to be the last person standing and so on) and there’s plenty of confusing fun to be had.

There’s no voice chat, all discussion is done through IRC-style chatbox.

I’d suggest it’s not the friendliest of games to just dive into and start playing – even the initial set of roles feels like rather a lot to take in (there’s no real training given other than tool tips, some sort of nursery slopes starting with vanilla Mafia and increasing the amount of roles would be useful, I think) but I suggest you do have a go because I want to hold a Bother’s Bar Lynching Party on a Saturday in November, possibly with Discord reaction (but all legit strat in the chat).

Here’s someone’s early experience to be getting on with:

And if you’re thinking they should have done this on telly… they have! There was a five episode pilot series called Traitor with Tony Livesey on BBC2 almost fifteen years ago but we can’t find any video of that. It was also used as a task on Dutch Mole a few years ago.