17 Best Social Deduction Games to Play With Friends

A social deduction game splits your group in two without anyone knowing exactly where the line falls. Most players are in the dark. A hidden few know precisely what is going on — and their job is to look exactly like everyone else. There is no board to master and almost nothing to memorise: you win by reading people, and by being read wrongly.

That is also why these games are hard to shop for. The mechanics matter far less than the fit — how many people you have, whether someone is willing to moderate, and how your group feels about being knocked out in the first two minutes. This list is sorted by what you actually have on hand.

What counts as a social deduction game

Three things have to be true. Information is asymmetric — some players know something the others don’t. The hidden players win by staying hidden, not by out-scoring anyone. And progress happens through discussion and voting, not through a random draw.

That last one is what separates the genre from bluffing games like Poker or Skull, where you are hiding a card rather than an identity. It is also why the same twelve-euro box can feel completely different with a new group: the game is mostly made of the people playing it.

Which one suits your group

Games that need nothing but people

1. Werewolf (Mafia)

The one everything else descends from, devised by Dimitry Davidoff at Moscow State University in 1986. At night the werewolves silently choose a victim; by day the village argues and lynches a suspect. Repeat until one side is gone.

It needs no purchase — a deck of cards assigns roles — and it scales to enormous groups. Two warnings. Someone has to moderate, and that person does not really play. And eliminated players are out for the rest of the game, which with a big group can mean forty minutes on your phone. Every modern game on this list is, in some way, a fix for one of those two problems.

Best for: big groups, outdoors, zero budget.

2. Two Rooms and a Boom

Your group splits across two physical rooms. One team has the President, the other has the Bomber, and neither knows where the other is. Rounds are timed, and at the end of each one, hostages are swapped between rooms. The Blue team wins if the President survives; Red wins if the Bomber ends up in the same room as him.

It handles thirty people comfortably, which almost nothing else does, and the cards are free to print. You need two rooms and someone calling time.

Best for: parties too large for a normal game.

Games you play on a phone

3. Among Us

The game that took the genre mainstream. Crewmates complete small tasks on a spaceship while impostors quietly kill them; every body discovered triggers an emergency meeting where the accusations fly. It works remotely, which is why it exploded, and it is free on mobile.

The catch is that it is a video game first. If everyone is in the same room, you all end up staring down at screens instead of at each other — which is precisely the thing social deduction is supposed to be about.

Best for: playing with friends who are not in the room.

4. Spyfall

Everyone gets the same location — a submarine, a casino, a hospital — except one player, who gets nothing. Players take turns asking each other questions about the location. Answer too vaguely and you look like the spy; answer too precisely and you hand the location to the real one.

Rounds are eight minutes and there are app versions that deal the cards for you.

Best for: small groups, and as a warm-up before something longer. It also turns up on our list of games like Heads Up, for the same reason — everybody plays at once.

5. Hidden Agenda

Worth being upfront: this one is ours, and it is not a hidden-role game. Nobody is a werewolf and nobody gets voted out. Instead every player draws three secret missions to pull off during an ordinary conversation — steer the topic onto a particular subject, get someone to agree with a deliberately vague statement, say a specific phrase without anyone noticing.

The reason it sits on this list is that it solves the same problem from the other end. Werewolf and Avalon stop the party so a game can happen; Hidden Agenda runs underneath the party, so there is no setup, no turn order and nothing to explain twice. It is the option for the evening where people are already talking and you do not want to interrupt them to deal cards.

Best for: parties, pre-drinks and rooms where a board game would kill the mood. Free on the App Store.

6. Guilty Party

Also ours, and it earns a place here by being Mafia with its two worst habits removed. Nobody moderates and nobody is eliminated: every player keeps a secret role for the whole evening, the culprit knows who they are from the first minute, and the accusation happens once, at the end.

One person opens a case on their phone; everyone else joins from a browser by scanning a code, so there is nothing to install and no deck to pass around. After that it runs on conversation alone — you are hunting a liar at your own table instead of waiting for a narrator to announce who died in the night.

Best for: four to six people, the size at which Werewolf stops working. Open the first case in your browser.

Card and board games worth owning

7. One Night Ultimate Werewolf

Werewolf with the two flaws removed. There is exactly one night and one day, the whole thing takes ten minutes, and nobody is eliminated — you all vote once, and that vote decides it. Roles get swapped around during the night, so by morning you may not even be on the team you started on.

A free companion app narrates the night phase, which means no moderator sits out.

Best for: the first social deduction game a group ever plays.

8. The Resistance: Avalon

Five to ten players; a majority are loyal servants, a minority are spies. Each round the group proposes a team to go on a mission, everyone votes on whether to send it, and the chosen players secretly pass or sabotage. Three successful missions win the game.

No elimination, no moderator, and the arguments are excellent — you are reconstructing who voted for whom three rounds ago. Merlin knows who the spies are but must never be obvious, which produces some of the best play in the genre.

Best for: groups who like arguing from evidence.

9. Secret Hitler

A liberal majority and a fascist minority take turns enacting policies drawn blindly from a deck. The president draws three, discards one, and passes two to the chancellor, who plays one — so a bad outcome never proves who did it. Liberals win by enacting five liberal policies; fascists win by passing six, or by getting Hitler elected chancellor late in the game.

The tension comes from that hidden discard: everyone can claim they had no choice, and sometimes it is even true.

Best for: groups that want a longer, meatier game than Avalon.

10. Blood on the Clocktower

The most ambitious game here. A Storyteller runs the town and, crucially, is allowed to bend outcomes to keep the story interesting. Dead players keep talking and retain one vote for the rest of the game, so being killed early is not a punishment — it is a role change.

It supports up to twenty players and runs one to two hours. You need someone prepared to learn the Storyteller role properly, and it is expensive. If your group has played Werewolf for years and wants the next thing, this is the next thing.

Best for: experienced groups with a dedicated host.

11. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

One player is the Forensic Scientist and knows who the murderer is, but may only communicate through tiles — cause of death, location, a scrap of evidence. Everyone else, murderer included, tries to interpret those clues. The murderer wins by surviving the investigation.

Nobody is eliminated, rounds are twenty minutes, and it plays up to twelve.

Best for: groups who prefer puzzling over accusing.

12. Coup

Two to six players, fifteen minutes, and a deck small enough for a pocket. You claim to hold characters you may not have in order to take their actions; anyone can call your bluff, and being caught costs you a card. Lose both and you are out.

It is elimination-based, but rounds are so short it barely registers.

Best for: filling twenty minutes; the easiest to teach on this list.

13. The Chameleon

The group gets a grid of related words and a secret word within it. Everyone knows which word it is — except the Chameleon. Each player says a single word about the secret one, trying to prove they know it without making it obvious to the impostor.

Very fast, very light, and it works with people who would never sit down to a “proper” board game.

Best for: mixed groups and family gatherings.

14. Insider

A twenty-questions game with a traitor in it. The Master knows the answer, the group asks yes/no questions to find it — and one player, the Insider, already knows and is quietly steering the group toward it. If the group guesses in time, they then have to work out who was pushing them there.

Two games stacked on top of each other in fifteen minutes.

Best for: groups who want something structurally clever.

15. Bang!

A western shootout with hidden roles: the Sheriff is public, the Outlaws want him dead, the Renegade wants to be the last one standing, and the Deputies protect the Sheriff without being sure who else is on their side. Everyone has range, weapons and cards to play.

More of a card game with deduction in it than pure social deduction, and it does eliminate players.

Best for: groups who want mechanics as well as arguing.

16. Shadow Hunters

Three factions — Shadows, Hunters and Neutrals — with individual win conditions, played out on a small board with damage and equipment. Working out who is on your side is the whole game, and getting it wrong can hand someone else the win.

Best for: groups bored of the two-team format.

17. Salem 1692

The witch trials as a deduction game. Players accuse each other, build up evidence toward a trial, and the witches try to survive the round. Thematic, tense, and it handles up to twelve.

Best for: groups who like theme carrying the tension.

Hosting one so it actually lands

Most social deduction evenings fail for the same handful of reasons.

• Start smaller than you think. Five to seven players with a fast game beats fifteen with a slow one. You can always scale up.
• Do not open with Werewolf. Learning the genre while someone sits eliminated is how groups decide they dislike it. Open with One Night or Spyfall.
• Set a clock. Discussion expands to fill whatever time it is given. Eight minutes per round is plenty.
• Never explain two games at once. Teach one, play three rounds, then decide together whether to move on.
• Let people be wrong. The best moments come from a confident, completely incorrect accusation. A table that gets defensive about being wrong will not enjoy the genre.

Where to start

If you are buying one box: One Night Ultimate Werewolf for a group that has never played, The Resistance: Avalon if they have, and Blood on the Clocktower if they have played for years.

If you are buying nothing: Werewolf with a deck of cards, or Hidden Agenda if the evening is already underway and you would rather not stop it to start a game.

If your group would rather talk than accuse, the same evening is better served by a conversation game. And in October, most of these get a great deal better — see Halloween party games for adults.