Be honest about your Traitors viewing habits. You’re not watching it — you’re playing along: clocking the over-explainers, howling at the Faithful for banishing another innocent, quietly certain that you, personally, would have smoked out the traitors by episode three.
That certainty deserves testing. And as of this year, you can test it in Cornwall.
The game the show can’t give you
The Traitors works because of one engine: a small group of people lying, and a larger group failing to spot it — round table by round table, banishment by banishment. What the show can’t give you is a seat. You can only shout at the sofa.
Blood on the Clocktower is the game that hands you the seat. A demon (your traitor) hides among 7 to 20 players. By day, the whole table debates and votes to execute its prime suspect — the round table, in other words, except you’re at it. By night, the demon picks people off. Everyone has a secret role and a scrap of information; nobody knows who to trust; and the reveals produce the exact noise your living room makes on banishment night, except it’s you gasping, because you voted wrong.
It’s been called “The Traitors, but live” so often it’s practically the subtitle. Fair, with two upgrades.
Two ways it beats the telly
You don’t get banished to your phone. The cruellest thing about the show — and about party games like Werewolf — is elimination meaning you’re done. In Clocktower, the dead stay in the game: ghosts keep whispering, keep scheming, and keep one final vote. Murdered on night one? You’re still in the endgame.
Everyone gets a superpower. No bare “Faithful” guessing on vibes alone. Every player has an ability — you learn a name, you protect a neighbour, you hear a number nobody else hears — so every player holds a puzzle piece. The table has to assemble the truth out loud, from fragments, while the demon’s minions salt the information with lies. It’s the show’s paranoia with an actual logic engine underneath.
“Do I need to be a board gamer?”
No — and Traitors fans are consistently the best recruits. The skills transfer exactly: reading people, tracking claims, noticing who went quiet after the vote. The host (the Storyteller) teaches the rules at the table in ten minutes, beginners play the beginner script, and confusion is legally a strategy. If you can follow an episode, you can play the game tonight.
Where the round table actually is
The Sleuth Society runs Cornwall’s only regular Blood on the Clocktower nights, hosted at Locked In Cornwall in Camborne — an escape room venue, which means the game gets an atmosphere no pub back room can offer. Sessions run 2–3 hours, dates go up on Eventbrite, and you can come solo or drag your fellow Traitors obsessives along.
Fair warning from those who’ve crossed over: the show gets harder to watch afterwards. Not worse — harder. You’ll see a Faithful trust the wrong smile and realise, with terrible clarity, that last Thursday that was you.
Faithful… or Traitor? There’s one way to find out, and it’s twenty minutes from Truro.