Cultist Says — A One Hour Mafia Style Social Bluffing Game

General Description

You are playing either a police officer who has infiltrated the Cult of the Open Window or a cultist yourself. Tonight is Open Window’s world domination-eve party! Cultists are here to celebrate and police hope to catch the cultists. The cult has set up a series of codes to ensure that no one can infiltrate. Luckily enough, the police has nabbed a cultist, and they had a paper with codes on it. In the pursuit the paper was damaged, and the clues are unfortunately damaged.

There will be other law enforcement from various agencies, but they will not know who each other are. Try to follow along with the codes, figuring out who is a cultist and who is police.

But wait! If you are too obvious with the codes, the cultists will catch on to you and you could be killed, so try and be subtle. Not too subtle, or the police may arrest you too… This is a game of mind games.

Set Up

You will need a couple things to play

A timekeeper (stopwatch that will show on your computer would be best)

A long sleeved shirt

A drink

A hat of some kind

Your phone

Playing The Game

This game is just played by hanging out and chatting. If playing online, make sure to have your video feed open at all times, but feel free to text or call other players to secretly chat on another device.

Make sure that you count down the start time. Ideally, the game will start exactly on an hour to better keep track of timing the clues. Don’t worry if you can’t, just count down and all start your stop watch at the same time!

After the last clue is over, the game master (or group is playing without a host) should — in a fair manner — have the remaining police take turns arresting who they believe are cultists.

Police win by making it to the end of the game with any surviving police officers. This is an infiltration mission, all you have to do is blend in.

Cultists win if all the police are killed by the end of the game. Killing happens during the game. Starting at ten minutes, and every five minutes thereafter, the group will vote to kill someone. The group may abstain if they feel that they do not need to or do not have enough information. Because the number of police will change the difficulty, the game master should limit the number of police around 30% of the group.

Below are the downloads for the police and cultist packets for two different games. Only download one packet from each game if you are playing, and have fun!

Player Instructions — Game 1

Police Packet

Cultist Packet

Player Instruction — Game 2

Police Packet

Cultist Packet