What better way is there to spend time with friends and family than lying to their face, falsely accusing them of crimes they didn’t commit, and doing pretty much everything in your power to dupe and deceive them for hours on end? Nothing. There is simply nothing better than that.
Because you are the duplicitous and unscrupulous person that you are, we thought we’d do you a favor and round up a list of our favorite social deduction games. These games, like the sudden and belated smash hit, Among Us, challenge your ability to lie through your teeth to the people that love and admire you in ways that are satisfying and wholesome. Indeed, if you’re bored with being and if you’re looking at any games like Among Us, here you go.
Enemy on Board
- Released: 08 May 2020
- Developer: Windwalk Games
- Platform: Windows
- Price: Free
The most like Among Us on this list, Enemy Aboard is another bout of alien shapeshifting among a crew just trying to accomplish menial tasks aboard a space ship. The key difference between Enemy On Board is that the crew can fight back — there is a variety of weapons available to all crew members, good and bad — and that there is a minimum of two aliens.
Aliens can choose from a handful of aliens that must transform in order to start killing, and have to work together to kill everyone before the crew does the same. If the game goes long enough, the Crew is given access to Power Armor that turns them into deadly killing machines that quickly turns the tables on whoever the alien is. Enemy on Board is great for those who wish Among Us had an actual, real-deal combat system with different playstyles.
Get it on: Steam
Werewolf/Mafia
https://youtu.be/mRiT-UPW4K0
- Released: 1986
- Developer: Dimitry Davidoff
- Platform: Browser, Life — the visceral, nauseating platform of life itself.
- Price: Rules for free, Cards for $10+
Werewolf is a classic party game from the 80’s, and one to which games like Among Us owe for their very existence. It, alongside Mafia, is considered the quintessential Party game and the OG, vanilla way to play requires nothing but real, live people to play with. No materials required. Except perhaps enough money to pay people to be your friend.
For Werewolf, you need at least 7 people (odd numbers preferred). Two will be randomly selected as Werewolves, one will be the Doctor, one the Seer, and one the Moderator who will orchestrate the game. The game is played in day and night cycles, with Werewolves killing people at night and Villagers arguing about who the Werewolves are and selecting one person to kill every morning.
You know, typical medieval life. Everything you love about Among Us is present in its original form in Werewolf; false accusations, bald-faced lies, misdirection, chaos — and one bonus: a lot more cheating. Make some friends for the first time in your life and try it out.
Get it on: Amazon | PlayWerewolf
Secret Hitler
- Released: 2016
- Developer: Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter, Tommy Maranges
- Platform: Life, the raw, undiluted platform that is this waking life
- Price: Free if you’re willing to print it all out. $35 – $75 if you’re lazy and want some shiny stuff.
Created as part of a Kickstarter in 2016, Secret Hitler hearkens back to Werewolf and Mafia by making itself available as either a board game, or a mere set of rules that can be doled out for free (though you can purchase a snazzy wooden-box edition from the creators). Like Werewolf, the game is cyclical and divided into two groups: Liberals and Fascists.
Gameplay proceeds in elections, with the goal to elect the person best suited for the job; Fascists are known only to each other, and must do their best to convince the liberals that they are that person. Despite being, you know, fascists. Secretly. Secret Hitler has a great sense of humor and is a supreme way to practice convincing people you are something you are not. Which is, of course, a vital life skill.
Get it on: SecretHitler | Amazon
Project Winter
- Released: 07 February 2019
- Developer: Other Ocean
- Platform: Windows
- Price: $19.99
Project Winter is something like Ark: Survival Evolved meets Among Us. A handful of strangers find themselves snowed in at a remote log cabin somewhere in some unspecific wilderness and must work together to call for rescue. Except, of course, there are a couple of bloodthirsty psychopaths among them, carefully plotting their deaths. What makes Project Winter extra special is the genuine survival craft gameplay overlaid on the social deduction angle.
It’s not just Traitors that Survivors need to be worried about; hostile wildlife and the forces of mother nature can be just as deadly, and thus it’s actually in the Traitor’s interest to help some of the time. Traitors can also make use of the extensive crafting system to orchestrate complex schemes; do you want to snipe them, wallop them over the head, leave a landmine, or stab them in the back while on an otherwise lovely stroll through the wilderness?
Get it on: Steam
Among Us 2
- Release: TBA
- Developer: InnerSloth
- Platform: TBA
- Price: TBA
With Among Us suddenly at the top of the gaming food chain despite being 2 years old, InnerSloth recently announced that they would be coming out with a sequel as soon as they can put out the fires spontaneously erupting out of their servers. Indeed, Among Us was, for years, a niche indie game quietly satisfying a modest player base in its own secluded sector of the Steam store.
That was, until Streamers and Youtubers realized that a) the game is super fun and b) it makes for some of the best TV non-money can buy and started pumping Among Us content full-blast into the veins of an all-too-willing audience. Thus, the unassuming indie game, in the span of a few months, became the single most streamed game on Twitch, with three times the numbers of Fortnite, Modern Warfare and double that of League of Legends.
Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. And with that gargantuan player base melting the floor underneath InnerSloth’s servers, they decided it might be better to release a sequel sometime in 2021 with an open beta likely somewhere in the first or second quarter. Expect new mechanics, increased scope, and other new content but the same great, friendship-destroying, relationship-ruining fun at its core.
Unfortunate Spacemen
- Released: 06 May 2016
- Developer: Geoff ‘Zag’ Keene
- Platform: Windows
- Price: Free
The third social deduction game like Among Us in its spacefaring, shapeshifting alien goodness, Unfortunate Spacemen is the flashiest game on this list. Set in a full-blown FPS, like Enemy on Board, Unfortunate Spacemen has a particular bent on combat that Among Us Lacks — but ratchets it up even higher with fully rendered environments and more complex tasks to complete alongside the shapeshifter just waiting to pick you off one by one.
What makes Unfortunate Spacemen a little extra special is the small things like proximity chat — voices fade with distance, making it easy to have private conversations and whisper falsehoods in the ears of your friends right before transforming into your twisted Monster Form and murdering them in a spaceship storage closet.
Get it on: Steam
Town of Salem
- Released: 15 December 2014
- Developer: Blank Media Games
- Platform: Browser,
- Price: $4.99
Town of Salem does its best to take inspiration from Werewolf and Mafia while piling on a whole bunch of extra mechanics to make it more… “gamey.” Which is good! At least it seems that way, with tens of thousands mostly positive reviews on Steam. In Town of Salem, it’s just as binary as Good Guys and Murdering Guys. The game hinges on the same day/night, Murder/Voting cycle, but introduces variety to the many possible roles players can take on.
Serial Killers, Sheriffs, Arsonists, there’s seriously 29 different characters for players to choose from that all interact differently, with many nuanced mechanics at play but the same torch-bearing mob trial full of lying, glorious dishonesty, and innocents being condemned to death. It’s great.
Get it on: Steam | BlankMediaGames
Mindnight
- Released: 04 August 2017
- Developer: No Moon
- Platform: Windows, macOS, Linux
- Price: Free
Mindnight is a pretty straightforward reworking of the Werewolf/Mafia game more than it is Among Us. The game takes on a cyberpunk setting to house its hacking motif, with players divided into Agents and Hackers both doing their best to secure 3 of 5 nodes. There’s the usual voting and, in this case, all caps “debating” as to who the hackers might be, with players sending members off in small teams to secure the nodes and trying to deduce, based on the results, who the hackers might be among the agents.
The premise is the same: figure out who the bad guys are; the gameplay is different, the method by which you deduce who the hackers might be is a bit more logical — should you by some miracle decide to apply said logic.
Get it on: Steam | MindnightGame
Werewolves Within
- Released: 06 December 2016
- Developer: Ubisoft
- Platform: Windows, PS4
- Price: $4.99
For fancypants VR players, Werewolves Within streamlines the classic Werewolf mechanics by condensing it down into a one night, one vote scenario and makes some clean simplifications to the game. Werewolves can actually see each other fully rendered as the werewolves they really are, while players just see another harmless villager sitting with them at the table.
There’s also proximity chat so you can not-at-all suspiciously whisper into each other’s ears, and the full VR experience captures all of your enraged, over-the-top finger-pointing and hand waving as you accuse your loved ones of murdering other loved ones when in fact it was you who murdered said loved ones you unrepentant monsters. Anybody who played the original game and has a supported VR headset should definitely give Werewolves Within — it’s the same game but veterans will get a kick out of having the experience rendered in the town square of Gallowston Village before them.
Deceit
- Released: 04 March 2017
- Developer: Automaton Games
- Platform: Windows
- Price: Free
Similar to Unfortunate Spacemen, Deceit takes the core dynamics of a well-crafted social deduction game and packs a fully three-dimensional first-person thriller game on top of it. In Deceit, players enter a multi-staged level as either Survivors or Infected, and must work together (some of the time) to progress onwards towards the exit. The Infected, of course, do their best to sabotage progress without alerting the others to their identity, biding their time for an opportune time to transform and murder the crap out of their unwitting counterparts.
What makes Deceit really shine is the way the level design promotes trust issues — because the inherent human tendency for distrust and suspicion simply isn’t enough — and forces players, even Survivors, to sometimes consider betraying one another for the sparse equipment and resources that come their way. Deceit should be the game of choice for those who want to see just how complex you can make a social game without ruining it.
Get it on: Steam | PlayDeceit
There you go. Ten surefire ways to destroy every relationship you’ve ever had. We hope you enjoyed this list, you pathological liar. Remember to keep your eyes peeled for Among Us 2 early next year!
