Love The Traitors? 6 Games You Can Play with Friends Right Now
You know the feeling. Someone at the roundtable looks the camera dead in the eye and says "I'm a faithful, I swear on everything" — and you're sitting at home yelling at the TV because you watched them murder someone six hours earlier. The Traitors works because it taps into something genuinely primal: the human need to figure out who to trust, and the slow, humiliating realisation that you are often very, very wrong.
The roundtable banishments hit differently from any other reality TV elimination. It's not the public voting someone off. It's a room of people you've eaten breakfast with, formed real bonds with, looked in the eye — collectively deciding your fate based on whispers and vibes and the fact that someone pointed at you a bit too confidently. And the morning murder reveals, the walk up to the turret, the name flipping over on the shield? That's genuinely tense in a way a game show has absolutely no right to be.
What makes the show so compelling — and what people are really searching for when they look for games like it — isn't the Scottish castle or the production budget. It's the dynamic. Hidden roles. Information asymmetry. The traitors knowing something the faithfuls don't. Suspicion building over days until it swallows people whole. That's a game. And it's one you can play with your friends right now.
What is social deduction?
Social deduction is the genre The Traitors belongs to, even if the producers would never use that phrase. The formula has two core ingredients: hidden roles (some players are secretly assigned information the others don't have) and information asymmetry (the traitors know each other, the faithfuls are working blind). Everything else — the discussion, the accusations, the voting — is players trying to either widen that gap or close it.
Mafia and Werewolf have existed as party games for decades using exactly this structure. But what The Traitors demonstrated so perfectly is that social deduction gets dramatically better with time. Hours of shared meals and conversations, not a frantic forty-five minute game night. Paranoia needs room to compound. A suspicious look at breakfast, a too-quick answer at dinner, a tell you almost missed — that's where the good stuff lives.
6 games that scratch the same itch
All six of these are Confide games, playable through WhatsApp with any group. No app, no coordinating schedules, no shared location required.
The Saboteur
This is the closest playable equivalent to The Traitors that exists. One player is secretly the Saboteur — they appear to be part of the team, contribute to group challenges, sit in the same discussions. But they're quietly, methodically making sure things go wrong. The faithfuls have to complete cooperative tasks while one person at the table is actively working against them and lying about it.
The parallels to the show are direct. Like the traitors throwing missions while maintaining complete composure, the Saboteur has to decide when to be subtle and when to act — and the group discussion after a failed challenge, where everyone's watching everyone else slightly too carefully, produces pure roundtable energy. If you've ever wanted to be Harry in series one, this is the game.
Best for: Groups who loved watching traitors sandbag challenges without blinking.
The Alliance
The Traitors has Survivor running through its DNA — the coalition-building, the vote management, the excruciating moment when an alliance you trusted shatters because someone flipped at the last second. The Alliance brings that structure directly to a WhatsApp group, with elimination rounds and a jury that ultimately decides who wins.
Players form coalitions, make deals, and vote each other out across multiple rounds. But hidden role assignments mean some players carry secret agendas that don't align with their stated loyalties. You can't take anyone's alliance at face value. The moment a person you vouched for writes your name down — and you watch it happen in slow motion — lands exactly as hard here as it does at the roundtable.
Best for: Fans who analyse the politics more than the actual challenges.
The Heist
Think Ocean's Eleven, except one member of the crew has been quietly feeding information to the other side. The Heist is cooperative — players plan and execute a multi-stage job together — but somewhere in the group is an Informant steering the crew toward failure while looking completely committed to the mission.
The Traitors connection is the crew dynamic. Everyone has a role, everyone seems invested, and then something goes wrong and suddenly you're staring at your closest collaborator with different eyes. The Informant wins by staying hidden long enough, which means the exact skills that make someone a great traitor on TV — charm, plausibility, the ability to redirect blame without leaving fingerprints — are what wins this game.
Best for: Groups that are already suspicious of each other and want a structured outlet for it.
The Court
If The Traitors is compelling because multiple people are running secret agendas in the same room, The Court is that concept with the dial turned up significantly. Every player holds a hidden political alignment, a secret objective, and casts votes that mean different things depending on roles that aren't fully visible to anyone.
This is The Traitors with more moving parts — more secrets, more layers, more moments where someone who read as an obvious innocent turns out to have been playing an entirely different game the whole time. The reveal rounds produce the same feeling as watching a faithful reach the final three and discover they'd been flanked by traitors since day one. Deeply satisfying, occasionally infuriating.
Best for: The group member who always wants a more complicated game and is never wrong to ask for one.
The Double Life
Is this person who they say they are? In The Double Life, players are given personas — some authentic, some fabricated — and the game centres on probing whether someone is telling the truth about who they fundamentally are. It's The Circle crossed with The Traitors, with the deception happening at the identity level rather than the role level.
The Traitors made brilliant television out of watching someone hold a false self under sustained questioning — Jaz in series two maintaining absolute composure while the room tried to unpick her. The Double Life recreates that dynamic in a way that turns surprisingly personal, because you're lying to (or about) people you actually know.
Best for: Groups who found the psychological profiling more gripping than the vote-counting.
The Prophecy
A lighter entry — The Prophecy is cooperative, with players working together to solve a puzzle under the guidance of one player acting as the Oracle. The catch is that one player has been given a subtly corrupted version of the solution and is — knowingly or unknowingly, depending on the variant — leading the group slightly astray.
Think of it as the traitor mechanic with the volume turned down. Nobody gets eliminated, but the same trust dynamics are present: who do you believe when the advice keeps leading you wrong? The corrupted-oracle moment, when it clicks, produces a genuine "wait, was that on purpose?" that's satisfying every time.
Best for: Groups new to hidden-role games who want to ease in before the real backstabbing starts.
Why WhatsApp makes social deduction better
Here's the case: the thing that makes The Traitors compelling isn't the castle or the costumes. It's the time. Contestants spend days together, and the paranoia accumulates in layers. A suspicious glance at breakfast becomes a hushed conversation at dinner becomes a name written at midnight. That can't be rushed.
Most social deduction games happen in a single evening — sixty minutes, everyone in the same room, fast roles and fast votes. You get rounds, not storylines.
Playing over WhatsApp changes the timescale entirely. A game runs across several days. You have hours to sit with a message, notice that someone's been conspicuously quiet, and cross-reference what they said in round one with what they're claiming now. Patterns emerge that simply cannot develop in a game night. That message someone sent at 11pm that reads completely differently once you know they had hidden information? That's the roundtable feeling — and these six games are the closest thing to it that exists outside a Scottish castle.