Clocktower is not meant to be a solvable game. In fact, solvability is a big problem in One Night. The most boring games of Clocktower are those where you can coldly logic everything out because there is No Other Way for things to have happened.

Clocktower is the ultimate iteration of a social deception game. It’s about the lying. It’s about the storytelling; not just by the storyteller but by the players themselves who have to create the alternative narratives and convince their friends of those narratives.

Clocktower is so good because it forces people to work together, and assume unreliable narrators regardless of intent. It gives individuals unique and powerful abilities, giving a lot of agency on the game regardless of whether they are dead or not. And because of all of this, it’s not the few but the many that achieve a success for their team.

I am utterly fascinated by this game and, more than that, thanks to its format, it yields a huge framework for experimentation by scriptwriters and storytellers. I have stopped playing any other kind of social deduction game - none can even hold a candle to Blood on the Clocktower.

I love it, at least with the right group, because while you basically never get reliable information, you do get a large amount of it. Some will be contradictory, some will match, most will need to be expanded on. You piece together narratives matching the evidence, poke holes in these narratives, offer alternative explanations, determine probabilities that multiple people are both speaking the truth. It's not that nobody knows anything, instead everyone knows something and will need to decide when and what to share with others. You might be able to get someone killed with a random accusation, but you're just as likely to reveal yourself to be a liar to someone in the process.