Its hard for me to believe that only 14 months ago, I didnt know what The Traitors was. But since I first smashed play on the Peacock reality series last January, Ive become obsessed watching every episode across five international versions, fan-casting future seasons, and even playing in a fantasy league for the currently airing third U.S. season. But all I ever really wanted to do is play the game myself. I spent much of last year brainstorming ways to try to turn family gatherings into an elaborate game of Traitors, a dream that I was never able to get off the ground. So, I resorted to looking into the official Traitors card and board games for easier options, only to determine that they fail to capture the true spirit of the game: yelling (largely baseless) accusations, making and breaking unsteady alliances, and most importantly unrestrained chaos.The Traitors is essentially a more theatrical version of Among Us, Werewolf, or Mafia, where a group of faithfuls are charged with banishing the hidden traitors, who themselves are tasked with choosing a faithful to murder each night. There are challenges to add gold to the prize pot, and to obtain shields, which guarantee players one night of safety from murder. But its the strategic murders and heated roundtables, where banishments are determined by majority vote, that make The Traitors so compelling, and that I wanted to experience firsthand.However, to recreate these elements means overcoming massive logistical obstacles one of the biggest being that in the show, murder victims are selected during secret meetings between the traitors while the faithfuls sleep. This is extremely difficult to pull off during a game that takes place over a matter of hours at someones apartment, as opposed to weeks at a Scottish castle-slash-airport Marriott hotel. (Having traitors coordinate through text was the best idea I came up with, and it was still a bad one.) Unable to think of a good solution, I had all but given up hope on living my Traitors fantasy until last fall, when my husband came home with Blood on the Clocktower, a massively popular social deduction game that I, admittedly, had never heard of.When he first tried explaining the rules in bed that night, I begged him to please, for the love of god, stop and let me sleep. But when I was well rested, he attempted again, and it became immediately clear that Clocktower was all the things I love about The Traitors (lying, yelling, roundtables, murrrrder) and none of the parts that bore me (challenges, shields).Clocktower follows the same basic format as The Traitors, Among Us, and other games of that ilk. To start, anywhere between five to 20 players are divided into two teams, good and evil, through a secret token draw organized by the person running the game, dubbed the storyteller. From there, Clocktower moves through all the familiar phases of gameplay: talking to fellow players and exchanging information during the day, gathering in a circle during the evening to nominate players for execution (Clocktowers version of banishment), and then shifting into the sleep portion, during which a member of the evil team (known as a demon) picks a player to murder while everyone else closes their eyes.While all of that is perfectly in line with The Traitors gameplay I longed for, once I played Clocktower for the first time, I was surprised to discover how much I loved the ways in which the game deviates. In Clocktower, every player is randomly assigned a character. This not only determines which team youre on, but each also comes with a special ability some of which have a shelf life or limited use, while others can be used for the duration of the game. A lot of the characters have abilities that are boons for their team such as the Undertaker, who learns the roles of players who are executed while other abilities further obfuscate the truth.For example, if youre the Fortune Teller, every night youre alive, you choose two players and learn if one is a demon. However, there is one good player that registers as a demon, meaning even the Fortune Teller cant trust their own intel. Then theres my favorite character, the Drunk, who is told theyre playing as another role, but is actually being fed misinformation from the very start. (Tom Sandoval would make an excellent Drunk, since hes already an expert in playing with a humiliating level of misplaced confidence.)Characters and abilities like these work to sow utter chaos, even when the players arent intending to do so. Youre never going to be able to bottle the special kind of mental decay that comes with playing a game in complete isolation for weeks like you see happen on The Traitors. This close contact and lack of distractions are how players become so delusionally convinced of their evidence (and I use that word loosely) against fellow players even if that evidence amounts to nothing beyond that another player didnt look surprised enough at the breakfast, or maybe they looked too surprised, or any of the other flimsy nonsense players stand on business for. But the roles in Clocktower do an impressive job of speedrunning this paranoia, with the various abilities giving players plenty of evidence (again, loose usage) to present during nominations with steadfast conviction, while also providing plenty of reasons other players shouldnt trust a word out of their mouths.This year, The Traitors U.S. and U.K. have introduced a similar mechanic to Clocktowers character abilities, granting one player the power of the Seer, which allows them to find out the alignment of another player. Unlike the Fortune Teller, the Seer has no doubt that their information is accurate. However, without anyone else to verify the Seers claims, pure havoc ensued when this played out on U.K., and Im hoping for the same when the Seer goes into play during Thursdays U.S. finale.Of course, Clocktowers characters arent just good for chaos. Theyre also where the best parts of strategy come in. There are endless creative ways to use your abilities, and the character youre given can have a big influence on who you choose to put your trust in. Figuring out how much to reveal about your character and to whom can also make or break your game. Many players choose to lie about their character and bluff being another, since outing yourself as someone with a powerful ability is a surefire way to find yourself at the top of the evil teams hit list. In my first game, I drew the Fortune Teller and early on chose to reveal my role to strengthen my case against another player. (I knew the risk, but I couldnt help myself. I got caught up in the drama!) Unsurprisingly, I was murdered that evening, with the added sting that I was wrong about the person I accused of being a demon.And thats where the biggest change from The Traitors comes in: Death isnt the end of anyones game. In Clocktower, once youre dead, you become a ghost. This means you still get to play the game, but with some restrictions, like only getting one vote to use for the entire rest of the game. Being able to play as a ghost brings further nuance to Clocktower strategy, as some players might even ask to be killed since they could gain information that way.Once I learned that in Clocktower, even dead players got to stay in the game, I knew Id finally found what Id been looking for. Because logistics aside, its hard to convince a group of people to come over knowing that they might spend more time commuting to play a game than actually playing it. And so, last weekend, I finally achieved my lifelong 14-month dream: I threw myself a Traitors-themed birthday party, with the centerpiece being a game of lightly reskinned Clocktower (think: ostentatious headbands, roundtable needle drops, a wall of player portraits, and a pyramid of gelt for the winners).Some of my friends are Traitors fans, some had heard of Clocktower but never played it, but everyone quickly picked up the game and fully committed. Alliances and strategies were formed, but thrown into flux or fully shattered after turbulent roundtables. Nobody was above slight emotional manipulation, and loved ones werent afraid to turn on each other. We yelled. We schemed. We doubted each other, and at times ourselves and rightfully so. During the final reveal, in which the remaining four players revealed their alignment, a chorus of screams erupted when we discovered wed all been duped, and the traitor walked away with a purse full of gelt.Playing The Traitors even if it wasnt even technically The Traitors was all the chaos and entertainment I had been dreaming of. Just like when I caught the Traitors bug last year, Im now down bad for Clocktower and this bug seems to be contagious. As soon as the game wrapped, almost everyone began asking when we could play again. This time I just hope Im the one doing the killing, and Im far from alone in that. It turns out murdering your friends is a popular love language.