Eyes Closed

Blood on the Clocktower.

No, not a cozy mystery but the opening event for a recent boardgame meet I attended. A sprawling social deduction game, it pits a small, informed team of a demon + minions against a large, uninformed team of good townsfolk. The washerwomen, mayors, soldiers, fortune tellers, etc. must figure out who the evil players are before they’ve all been murdered in their sleep. It’s best played with a large group of seasoned players. Why seasoned? Because this game, like others of its kind, explicitly tells its players to do one crucial thing:

“Close your eyes.”

During the night phase, the demon and its minions awaken to silently coordinate by pointing at victims and gathering information to build the web of lies they’ll spin during the day phase. This can be a difficult process with younger or inexperienced players, who might think that the aim is to win as fast as possible. Thus they often peek, hoping to identify the demon in the first round, thereby obliterating the game itself. Who cares which team won? This isn’t the World Cup! The whole point is the process of deduction, the tension, and the slow creep towards victory as we all get a chance to play Poirot — or demonly lie about playing Poirot.

I had a lot of time to think while I sat there with my eyes closed (with fifteen players, the night phase took a while). This willingness to close one’s eyes and trust the game so that the plot may unravel…that’s what a reader does, too, and perhaps nowhere more so than with an omniscient narrator. This form demands patience, but also the belief that the truth will be revealed when the time is just right. I’m writing something new at the moment, and I think it needs omniscient narration, not least because some scenes hinge on the language of frogs. But old first-person habits keep tugging me back: No, I can’t write this because the character doesn’t know it or The reader will be frustrated that the narrator is holding back information.

But wait… If the reader made it past the first paragraph, they’ve closed their eyes, meaning they accept that the omniscient narrator divulges certain secrets as it weaves among the characters’ minds, world and history. The reader is thus unlikely to peek or to demand to know why we aren’t locked inside a given character’s head. They are happy to play the game, trusting this form to deliver something that a single perspective can’t.

Incidentally, I was dealt the Empath role in Blood on the Clocktower, meaning I received secret information on an evil player. I shared this knowledge with everyone (townsfolk and demons alike because my eyes had remained closed) and was promptly murdered in my sleep. Technically, I lost.

Best game I’ve played in a while.