Cairn

A game of Blood on the Clocktower is a one-time stage show with a cast who don't know the roles and are mostly lying to each other. Who has died matters to every nomination, and each dead player keeps one ghost vote to spend, but from a chair in a circle of fifteen, that's hard to keep track of.

Online, the app handles some of the theatre: the winner goes up on screen and everyone's character is revealed in one go. In person, the storyteller says "evil wins!", half the town cheers, and the other half make loud, theatrically sad noises. Cairn began as a tealight by every chair, white while you're alive and black when you die. It looked properly ominous, and it meant swapping tealights at every dawn like a very sad waiter.

Every player gets a shroud: frosted glass over fourteen colour LEDs, on a matte base 80 mm across. While you're alive it's a candle. When you die it gutters out, slowly, into a dim purple flame with two white points of light for your ghost vote; spend the vote and it goes dark purple and still. At the end, the storyteller walks the circle naming roles and each shroud flares as they reach it, blue for good and red for evil. Or the town argues about who the Demon was for another thirty seconds, and then they all light at once.

Setting up is a walk round the circle. Lift a shroud out of its case and it wakes, finds the others, and waits for a seat; press each one's button in seat order and Blocktower knows who is sitting where. From then on the shrouds follow the game, and nobody touches them until it's time to pack up.