I was in Mira HQ and all the lights were out. The reactor was failing. No one was doing any tasks because the doors were on the fritz and there were only three of us left: Brown, Pink and me. We ran in tiny circles in the dark, rotating around each other in small, panicked orbits, waiting to see who would make the final move …
So have you played Among Us yet? Millions of you have. Millions of you sitting in dark rooms, on lazy afternoons, socially distanced, bored, frustrated, furious. It is a simple game that is deceptively complex. There are 10 players dressed as spacemen — colorful little sausages with funny hats and little pets — all running around a map, frantically trying to complete a bunch of make-work tasks. They’re emptying trash and calibrating the engines, blasting asteroids (almost certain death, in my experience) and fixing the wiring. And all the while, one or two or three of their fellow space-sausages are secretly aliens. impostors, who live only to murder.
… There was one impostor left. Two crewmates. It was three in the morning, my time, and I should’ve been asleep but instead, I was staring at the screen, waiting, while the klaxons blared and the emergency lights flashed …
You’ve heard of this game before, even if not in this format. The game — the basics of the game, its spine and format — has been around since 1986. Called Mafia (or Werewolf, depending on the particular flavor), it was a party game invented by Dimitry Davidoff, a psychology student at Moscow University, as a way to mess with a bunch of high school students he was tutoring. You take a bunch of players and have them draw cards. Most of them will be peaceful townsfolk, but a couple will secretly be members of the mafia who can kill other players every night. At night, everyone puts their heads down while the mafia decide who to murder. In daylight, everyone is heads-up and arguing over who they believe are the killers. The townsfolk win if they can correctly identify the mafia. The mafia win when they finally kill everyone else.
It is a deduction game, a psychology game. You read the room, ask your questions, make your accusations and see how each player reacts. Only a majority vote of players can indict a murderer and, at least in the early going, most of those votes are wrong. Among Us is the latest variant, launched to virtually no acclaim back in 2018 by an indie shop called InnerSloth with no particular talent for marketing, but a dogged determination to make this game work.
… 20 seconds left. Then 15. Someone was going to have to do something soon…
The mechanics are slight — you run around, do your tasks, try not to die. You stalk the players you think are suspicious, trying to stay in groups, in plain view. If you’re an impostor, you try to look innocent until the moment you find yourself alone with another player. Then, you stabby-stab and run away. Impostors can use vents on the map to jump from one section to another. They can sabotage vital ship systems, sealing the doors, killing the lights, turning off the oxygen. As the game goes on, these sabotages stack up. In a good game, everything starts going wrong, and the bodies are everywhere. And the only time players are allowed to speak to each other — the only time they’re able to point the finger and accuse someone of being an impostor — is during emergency meetings. Text chat is not a great vehicle for psychological subtlety. But it is all the little sausages have. And even within the limited framework of chat, there are tricks, gimmicks, ways to deflect and manipulate.
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