BLOOD ON THE CLOCKTOWER
Welcome to the Town Square.
I've been hosting Blood on the Clocktower game events in Dallas for a couple of years now. This is where I like to talk about why.
The short pitch: It's the best party game I've ever played. It rewards social intelligence, creates memorable moments, and works equally well for seasoned gamers and total newcomers. Every game is different. Every game has a story.
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Blood on the Clocktower is a social deduction game for 7–20 players — think Mafia/Werewolf or Among Us, but designed to be both intricate and intriguing. The town of Ravenswood Bluff has been cursed: a Demon walks among you, and unless the townspeople can identify and execute it before time runs out, everyone loses.
What sets it apart is the Storyteller, a dedicated facilitator who runs the game, manages information, keeps things fair and fun, and makes every session feel like a crafted experience, rather than a random coin flip. The Storyteller doesn't play; they run the show. And that role, it turns out, is one I find immensely satisfying.
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I came to Blood on the Clocktower through the board game community. I've been a serious hobbyist for decades, and I have a background in game design that makes me pay close attention to how games are built. BotC stopped me in my tracks. The design is meticulous in a way you don't often see.
I started Storytelling home games in 2024. What began as one experimental session with friends turned into a regular thing: biweekly games, a mailing list, Discord, and players who drive across the Metroplex to play my games. As of early 2026, I've run BotC games at more than 50 game night events in the Dallas area. For most of these, I organized and hosted the whole event.
I’d estimate I’ve Storytold 200+ individual games of Clocktower, with anywhere from 6 to 20 players in each game. I've run games at conventions, taught the game to complete newcomers in bars, cafes, and stores, and spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a session memorable versus merely functional. The short answer: it comes down to the Storyteller. A great Storyteller makes the game come alive.
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I'm in the process of supplementing my regular sessions by running events in public venues around the DFW area — bars, breweries, game cafes. If you want to know when and where the next game is, the best thing you can do is to drop me a line, using the Contact form on this site, send me a text message, or email.
BGG.Con Spring 2026 - Day 4
Beyond the games that I ran as Storyteller, I played in probably about 10-12 games as well, most of them with Charles playing too. A few of those were blind-draw games of Trouble Brewing in the wee hours of the final day of the Con.
By then we were way too exhausted to still be running any games.
BGG.Con Spring 2026 - Day 3
So this was an entire day of Sects & Violets debauchery! I may have gone overboard with this script, considering how many times I ran it during the whole Con.
But I do think people had a good time, and I certainly don’t regret it.
BGG.Con Spring 2026 - Day 2
Friday of BGG.Con - I scheduled another game of Trouble Brewing, with the only real difference being that on the Thursday game, I had offered a more extensive teach of the game. Before this Con, in years past and other conventions, I hadn’t scheduled any games, figuring there’d be plenty of time and space for pickups.
But this time around I wanted to give it a try, despite the unpredictability of game lengths, and I think it worked out decently well.
BGG.Con Spring 2026 - Day 1
The Thursday of BoardGameGeek.Con Spring 2026 was lovely! I met up with lots of old friends, and I ran 4 games of Blood on the Clocktower. Like usual, I stayed in the Clocktower lobby area pretty much the whole time - the atrium of the big ballroom.
In fact, I don’t think I even entered the big ballroom at any point in the entire Con, which I find just hilarious.
That’s-a Very Spicy Zom-a-buul!
Tonight we managed to play a lot of games over the course of the evening - 6, altogether. Sosa designed his script Trolley Problem is to result in fast games and sudden, unexpected wins and losses. So we were able to play a few of those, and we started with a Teensyville.
I’m not sure which was spicier - the salsa or the argumentation!
We’re on the Right Track, Baby
Tonight we managed to get in a Teensyville game before the first full game, but we mostly played Trolley Problem. I STed the first one, and Sosa STed the second, but unfortunately we weren’t able to play the latest version of his script, because the printer jammed while I was hustling to create enough copies. We’ll play the newer version next time!
Excited for What’s to Come
Tonight was a big night for me, because I made several big announcements to my friends & players:
I’ve officially created Fishboy Games, a company that I’m going to try to build into a business involving hosting Clocktower events & games, Storytelling, playing the game together, inclusively bringing in new players, possibly opening a physical location (eventually), and frankly, exploring the world of Clocktower to find a way it can be the cornerstone of a small business.
What to do with Heretics? Poison ‘em!
This was the first Friday game night in a long time, and everyone definitely had fun! Sosa did the Storytelling, because he was excited to playtest the latest changes to his script, Trolley Problem. There was a little mishap with the pizza delivery, but Doordash & Marco’s made it right in the end.
I was a little optimistic to think we'd be able to start a game around 6…
Shaking Things Up
Tonight we shook things up in a few different ways - we tried a new food vendor for the first time in a long time, Panda Express, but more importantly, we played more games! I hustled people into sitting down and starting a game as soon as we had enough players for even a Teensyville, so that way everybody got in a game quickly, but later arrivals didn’t have to wait long for the next one to start.
Interestingly, this was the day before Easter, so attendance was down a bit from a typical Saturday game night. However...
Intoxicated by a Lack of Expertise
This night I debuted my own new custom script, The Dunning-Kruger Effect, which I’ve been noodling around on for several weeks. It’s similar to the last one I built, Your Own Little Worlds, especially in that it’s built largely around the Boffin, because I selected most members of the good team specifically to be interesting choices to give to the Boffin.
I decided that going in the Summoner direction on YOLW, and trying to balance the script for that Minion was just making things too complicated...
Back by Popular Demand
I reprised my script Your Own Little Worlds - several players enjoyed it quite a lot last month, in spite of my expectations that it could end up being quite broken or feeling unsolvable. They asked me to run it again, so I did.
But I did make a few changes to it, and I reprinted it for these runs. The changes I made before these games were...
A New World Dawns Tonight
This was the first time I was running the most recent script I’ve built, which I eventually decided to call “Your Own Little Worlds”. It prominently features the Boffin, the Summoner, the Lord of Typhon, and the Yaggababble. It has a cool mix of base 3 and experimental characters, at least I hope it does, but I didn’t honestly know how it would go once it actually encounters the strategic minds of my players.
Sosa had a lot of questions, some of which I had never even thought to considered...