Blood on the Clocktower vs The Resistance: Avalon: Which Should You Buy?

Blood on the Clocktower is Werewolf after the designer fixed everything you quietly hated about Werewolf. Every single player gets a meaningful role with a power, so nobody's a bored villager waiting to die. A Storyteller runs the night, hands out clues, and quietly decides what's true, and the whole table works one shifting murder puzzle together. The bit I find delicious is the drunk and poison effects: even your good, honest information might be a lie, so you can never fully trust your own clue. And when you do die, you keep a vote and stay in the game instead of getting banished to scroll your phone in the corner.

Avalon is much leaner. A handful of you are loyal servants of Arthur, a couple are spies for Mordred, and over five missions the good team tries to pass three quests while evil tries to sabotage them. Nobody dies, nobody sits out, you just talk, argue, and lie. The twist that makes it sing is Merlin: one good player secretly knows exactly who the bad guys are but can't say so, because if evil's Assassin guesses Merlin at the end, evil steals the whole win. That one rule turns simple bluffing into genuine high-wire tension in a game you can finish before the pizza arrives.

This is the biggest practical gap between them. Avalon teaches in two minutes, honestly. You can hand it to a party of near-strangers and be mid-accusation before anyone's finished their drink. Clocktower asks a lot more of you. It wants 8 to 13 people, ideally ten or more, and it leans hard on the Storyteller, who needs to actually know the script before game night. The standard advice (and I agree with it) is to learn the Trouble Brewing script first and build from there.

So the question isn't really which is harder, it's who's doing the work. With Avalon, nobody carries the game. With Clocktower, somebody at your table has to volunteer to be the Storyteller and do homework, and if they're shaky, the magic just doesn't show up. If nobody in your group is itching to run things, that answers this whole comparison by itself.

Avalon's superpower is repeat plays in one sitting. It plays in twenty minutes, so you can run it three times in a row, and lots of players say it hums best around seven people. The catch is fatigue: constant finger-pointing genuinely fries your brain, so tired groups tap out after about three rounds. It also falls flat with quiet, non-confrontational tables, and the cardstock is thin enough that regular shufflers will want sleeves. Small gripes, big payoff.

Clocktower isn't a filler you slot between other games. It IS the night, and with the right crowd it's the kind of session people talk about for weeks. It stretches all the way up to 20 players, which nothing else on this page can touch. But it's fragile. Get a flat group or a shaky narrator and it falls over, and that huge box is a real commitment on the shelf and in the bag. When it clicks, though, real players call it a masterpiece, and I think they're right.