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Current goon servers for putting together groups to play these games: MPREG Discord Server - Has an Among Us channel, which... also does Codenames for some reason. Ah, social deduction games! (also sometimes known as hidden role games) Gather together 5 to 15 of your closest friends and have a grand old time murdering each other, accusing each other of murder, and figuring out the most effective ways to lie to one another. Now in video game form! Let's talk about them. Some History: These games have been around for over 30 years at this point, and started as a party game with real other flesh and blood people, with the bad people playing the role of werewolves or mafiosos! I'm not 100% sure about this, but I get the impression they were a natural evolution of the already popular "murder mystery" party which by that point had already been growing and diversifying and getting weird in some interesting ways. They eventually became popular in online chats and forums and we have a whole subforum dedicated to running forum-based ones here on Something Awful. This is not the thread to talk the traditional or forums based versions of this game, though! At some point, they hit the card game scene, and we got some really amazing tabletop board and card games out of the continued growth of the game type. Stuff like "Bang!"! Also some less amazing games like Secret Hitler and The Resistance. But the important thing was it was growing and changing. I guess you can talk about those games in this thread if you want to. But mostly this thread is about the next step they took - into video games! Let's take a look at some modern, currently popular social deduction games you can play right now with your friends, or other goons, or random online people you're only going to end up frustrated by! I feel like most of the latest games are explicitly inspired by John Carpenter's "The Thing". That might just be me, though. --- Game List ---  [Steam] [Itch.io] [Android] iOS [Nintendo Switch] All the rage among streamers during COVID times, Among Us is still the current king of the genre. It doesn't really do anything super new, and without mods its fairly limited compared to its predecessors, but what it does do it does well and brings together many other innovations in the genre into a simple, easy to understand, widely available, cheap(or free), well presented and visually appealing package. The one thing it does that I haven't seen before is having dead players become "ghosts" that can still contribute to their team winning, even if it is only in a small way. It adds a lot though! So what is it like? You play as a colored bean, usually wearing a hat, that runs around a spaceship, space station, or research station on an alien planet (and now an airship as well!), trying to do "tasks" of various duration and difficulty whose primary purpose is to fill up your screen, steal your attention, and force you into various places on the map you wouldn't normally be inclined to visit. Complete them all and you win! One or more of your spacemen will be secret alien impostors. Part of an invasion, and their goal is a bit different - to murder every last crewmate (or at least enough crewmates that they no longer have a chance to fight back) without getting caught by the ones who are still alive. When someone finds a dead body or hits the emergency meeting button, the crew is finally allowed to talk to each other to try and solve the murders, and can throw a suspect to their deaths if they can coordinate their votes. To aid them, impostors have the ability to hide in vents and use them to travel around the area, and to sabotage vital systems like lights and oxygen. Most people I know of play Among Us in Discord with a preset rules regarding when you can speak and what about. If you want to play with fellow goons, there's an active Among Us group on the MPREG Discord Server There are several popular mods that expand the basic among us experience, two of which are particularly noteworthy: Town Of Us: An Among Us mod inspired by Town of Salem, this adds lots of new roles, powers, and mechanics to the game. This includes lots of the traditional social deduction game roles with new twists, like Sheriffs, Serial Killers, Detectives, Jesters and Medics, along with new Among Us specific style roles like shapeshifters, tunnel diggers, and body hiders. Even if you don't use any of the expanded roles or mechanics, it has some nice quality of life improvements like new outfits and the ability to do things like change the map without creating a new lobby. Better CrewLink: Proximity Chat! A built in voice server allows you to speak to other players that are nearby. Also includes a nice interface to let you know who is talking. The newest version includes an option Impostor Radio, letting the impostors talk on their own voice channel when they choose to. Makes the game a lot more fun for casual play, but also leads to people hanging around socializing instead of doing their tasks. --- ---  [Browser] [Steam] [Android] [iOS] The previous king of social deduction video games, this one is extremely similar to classic forums based Mafia, including all the crazy power roles. I don't play it myself, so if you like this game tell me some more about it! ---  [Browser] Similar in concept to Among Us, you're a changeling on a spaceship trying to sabotage the crew. This game is much slower paced, however, and far more involved. Expect to play it over the course of real life weeks. Unlike most social deduction games, the core scum role isn't a killer role (although they can kill, they usually don't want to) but instead a Cult role, where they work to slowly convert the rest of the crew by tricking them into becoming infected and hiding their own behaviours. The players all have specific roles and skills that are important to keeping the ship running and finding and eliminating the MUSH. --- Other games I'm probably going to talk more about here at some point: Spaceship 13 - Another goon classic, to such an extent that we actually created our very own version of it, Goonstation. Chaos and sometimes roleplaying. Haven't played in forever, but still seems active? Built on a terribly, jank engine, but still fun. First Class Trouble - First person take on the genre. Pushing people into traps and watching them die is fun. Project Winter - Do you like survival games? Do you want to play a social deduction game that is also a survival game? I guess this is that game. Goose Goose Duck This is basically an Among Us clone with Town of Us and Crewlink like functionality built in. The problem? It looks bad, feels bad to play, and the cosmetics are part of a really weird microtransaction system even though the base game is free.
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May 26, 2021 21:54
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