The Among Us game has gathered millions of fans in the shortest time and has led to an increase in interest in this kind of game like Agario. Such games not only develop deductive thinking skills but also bring together friends and players from all over the world. There is, perhaps, nothing more exciting than trying to find out which one of you is a traitor and secretly kills your comrades.
Social deduction games – or impostor games – the place where there is nothing personal, only strictly business (or not?). These games are about putting a cunning traitor to a team game and watching how players try to reveal each other’s roles to find a vile impostor. It’s practically a survival game where everyone is under suspicion and must defend their honor—even the imposter himself.
So the traitor’s task is not only to hide and secretly kill friends but also to confuse the players and lead them astray. A well-thought-out strategy and alibi will help you win the game while other players are blaming each other.
Based on the specifics of these games, they have special scenes—for example, group meetings where players discuss their suspicions. If you are bad at hiding and are under suspicion, the chance you will lose is quite high. But you can get away with it by shifting the focus to another team player. Killing players during the game, you also manipulate the rest of them and make them suspect and kill each other. But be careful. After the first vote, your lie can be revealed.
Thus, your main tasks are to kill and create confusion and discord in the team. Below there are seven of the most popular games that improve deductive thinking skills. Let’s choose your strategy. Manipulate or kill? Or combine it?
Among Us
Among Us is a classic social deduction game. The story is quite simple – a team of astronauts is trying to fix their spaceship while completing various tasks. Be attentive and stay close to other players. While you’re downloading data, throwing away trash, or fixing something, you could be brutally killed by a monster that you thought was your teammate. The feature of the game is that even if you are killed, you can continue to perform tasks being a ghost. Thus, you bring your team closer to victory.
Walking around the ship, you can often stumble upon the corpse of your friend. In this case, do not waste time and press the emergency call button. But before that, do not forget to look around quickly – suddenly, a traitor is somewhere nearby and is trying to escape as soon as possible. You can use it at the meeting. But impostors do not sleep and can turn the situation in their favor with a thoughtful alibi or slander the speaker. Here the deductive skills of the players come into play. After discussing all suspicions, you can send a potential traitor on a walk-in space or skip the vote if you want to take a closer look at those around you.
Playing as a traitor, you have special opportunities – you can arrange sabotage in one of the ship’s compartments. You can turn off the lights to hide from prying eyes or cause the reactor to malfunction. The team must immediately eliminate your tricks. Otherwise, they all will die. In the meantime, you can look for a new victim. It’s worth noting that the kill button needs time for rebooting. Therefore, before killing, look around – you don’t need witnesses because you cannot instantly kill them.
Project Winter
Winter, cold, blizzard, and betrayal. Project Winter is a game with elements of survival, an interesting location, and an idea. Your team ended up in the uninhabited permafrost area without any help. Your aim is simple – to complete special tasks and then call rescue transport while remaining alive. If you play as an ordinary character, then you need to simultaneously perform quests and, of course, find an impostor and expel him. In the classic version of the game, there are usually two such impostors.
The team of players must go through all four stages and have limited time to get out of the harsh wasteland. Performing as a well-coordinated group is the only chance to win this battle. Everyone will have their task – someone collects food, some players extract stone, and other resources. In this case, you need to act carefully and monitor each other’s actions. The more players die, the closer the fatal snowstorm is to you.
Communicate with your team in different ways: with everyone nearby using voice chat or with private radio channels. You can also use text chat and emoticons. If the survivors do not communicate with each other, they will not be able to complete their tasks and protect themselves from the traitors. In this game, you can’t just kill suspected players. You can expel them if you consider them being a threat.
In addition to traitors and their dirty tricks, there are other obstacles in the game. On the way to rescue transport, you may face wild animals. And they are not averse to feasting on human flesh. Since you are in harsh weather conditions, it is easy to lose touch with other players. Be careful. It will be difficult for players who have strayed from the team to survive. They can die in the woods or become easy prey for traitors.
Town Of Salem
Town Of Salem is a bro of the classic Mafia and will be an excellent option for those who love variety. The game has 48 unique roles with special abilities and challenges. Like the Mafia, this game has two phases – day and night. At night, kills are committed, and player abilities are applied, and during the day, night events are brought up for discussion.
At night, everyone acts according to their role. For example, a Trapper can set a trap to protect a player and learn about his visitors, and a Jailer can put someone in jail for the night. There is a common Doctor who heals players or himself during the nighttime. You will be delighted by the fact that the game is always varied and always full of surprises, even if you have the same role.
There are three role groups: Town, Mafia, and Neutral. The goals of the first two groups are clear. Neutral roles are unique, not only in their abilities. They have different goals. Moreover, Neutral heroes appear as defectors and can take any side. But the trick is that players won’t be able to know which side they’re playing on.
These aspects make the game especially interesting and confusing. And you will need all of your deduction and manipulation skills to make your team win.
Unfortunate Spacemen
Unfortunate Spacemen name speaks for itself. This is a multiplayer space action game and is played in the first-person. The classic concept is to be trapped and fight for life until rescuers arrive. And the monster here is more terrible than ever. This creates a particularly frightening and disturbing atmosphere.
The monster-traitor is very strong and has unique abilities. He can pretend to be a member of the team. Under such a role, he creates sabotage and does tricks. Or it can take its fearsome form and start crashing and killing everyone around the space station. The fact remains that the monster in this game is incredibly strong. And he can only be defeated with the efforts of the whole team. By completing tasks and using special abilities, each side increases its chances of winning.
Barotrauma
You are at the bottom of the ocean in a submarine on Europa, the moon of Jupiter, and this can no longer be pleasant. And the fact that there is a traitor evokes panic and horror.
Barotrauma is a 100% cooperative survival game. Only by working as a team can you survive in such an unpleasant environment in the depths of the waters of Europe. The plot of the game always develops in different ways, and even without the presence of traitors, it is quite difficult to survive.
A feature of this game is that you can set the direction of the plot. You can add a traitor or not save your nerve cells. But there is also a very interesting item in the settings about adding a traitor to the game – setting ‘maybe’. And this setting creates a special tension in the game. You rely on chance and do not know, this fish just swims by or wants to devour you and wash it down with fruit juice. Cooperate as a team and communicate – perhaps you can survive in such conditions.
Deceit
Deceit is also presented in the first-person shooter genre. Your team of 6 players is locked in in a place like an abandoned mental hospital. Your task is to find a way out and get out as soon as possible while helping each other. But it can’t be that simple and rosy, right? There are two players infected with a virus, and they are eager to kill someone.
The game has two phases. During the first phase, players collect useful items, and the infected ones seek out blood bags and make sabotage. Useful supplies and devices for testing players for the virus will be scattered across the maps, but the traitors can spoil it, be attentive! The first phase is your only chance to exclude infected players and win.
In the first phase, the virus has no visual effect. Infected ones don’t look special, don’t move in any other way, and have no differences with teammates until the lights go out.
Periodically, you play in the darkness. This is the second phase, during which the virus takes action and transforms infected players into a monster. In this form, they become stronger and are saturated with bloodlust, but at the same time, they are afraid of the light. Use the light obstacles found on the maps to get to the next area and get away from the monster. Healthy players just can’t kill a monster – they don’t have a weapon for that. It is possible to kill the infected only in their human form. Therefore, to increase your chances of survival, cooperate, and run as fast as you can.
GMOD
Garry’s Mod game was released back in 2004 and is now gaining popularity again. And this is thanks to the special highly coveted multiplayer game mode. In a standard team of 8 players, there are three groups of roles – innocents, two traitors, and one detective. This is a standard set, but you can change the roles and their concentration in the settings.
The detective and innocents work together. The task of this group is to find out and deactivate the traitors as soon as possible. While the Traitors try their best to kill the innocents.
You don’t know who the traitor is until you meet him face to face. There is nothing worse than knowing the killer and being unable to inform your teammates about it. You are dead, and you have taken all the secrets with you.
Traitors in this game can acquire some weapons. Good equipment is cool, but also is a sign to the detective who you are. Therefore, in order not to get burnt, it is better to use your powers.
Detectives need to be very careful not to be stabbed in the back. After all, detectives are the main defense of the city and the main goal for traitors.
Secret Hitler
This board game is now available online as well. A game is about political intrigue in Germany in the 1930s.
Players in Secret Hitler unite in two teams of Liberals and Fascists – and each group pursues its own goal: to find out Hitler or bring him to power. The fascists know each other, and they also know Hitler. However, he doesn’t know who is playing for him and who is his enemy. Like the Liberals, Hitler must find out the truth on his own.
To bear away, the Liberals should pass 5 of their liberal laws or find Hitler. Fascists have two ways to defeat Liberals – to pass six fascist laws or to approve only three while choosing Secret Hitler as chancellor.
Players choose a government – president and chancellor. The government is obliged to approve or reject laws. Laws are drawn by chance in the amount of three: blue cards – liberal laws, red cards – fascist laws. Then the president chooses two laws and hands them over to the chancellor, who approves one of them. If the government has approved a fascist law, you should look for a traitor.
Playing with teams, you can observe a serious social confrontation. And only you can decide – in front of you are your friends or fascists.
Develop your deductive skills through online games. After all, who knows, maybe they will be useful to you in real life because we often work in groups.
