The Neighborhood Liars

About the Game

Welcome to the friendliest street in the world. Also the most dishonest.

White picket fences. Trimmed lawns. Mailboxes painted to match every house. And somewhere on this cul-de-sac, somebody who spends their nights burying bombs in the neighbors' gardens.

The Neighborhood Liars is social deduction and card bluffing for 4 to 12 people. You get two cards, two hearts, and absolutely no obligation to tell the truth.

Say anything. Prove nothing.

On your turn you climb onto the plaza table, take the microphone, play a card face down and declare what it is. That declaration can be a complete lie. If nobody challenges you, the effect happens anyway — invented or not.

But if someone slams the LIAR! button, the two of you draw revolvers in the middle of the plaza:

• You lied? You take the shot, lose a heart, and your real card is revealed to everyone.
  
• You told the truth? The accuser goes down instead — and your effect still happens.

Everyone sees which of your two cards you spent, never what it was. The whole table can track your hand. That is entirely on purpose.

The night belongs to the impostor

When the sun sets, everyone acts at the same time, in secret — and now the card is real, no bluffing allowed. You visit houses, shield neighbors, watch doorways, poison whoever went out to do harm, swap someone's whole hand in the dark.

And the Bomber buries one more bomb. Nobody sees where. Not even the other impostors. If he is the only impostor at the table, he may even stay home — and swear in the morning that it was a quiet night.

Come morning the rooster crows, the doors swing open, everyone steps outside together — and that is when you find out whose garden already held two bombs. The house swells, shudders and vanishes in a cartoon mushroom cloud, roof cartwheeling all the way to the plaza.

The street remembers

Everything the table sees ends up in the Neighbourhood Notebook: who played what and on which day, who got caught lying and which card flipped, who slept in the cell, which house went up — and since which night it had been mined, on a crooked little sign stuck in the rubble. Nobody has to memorise twelve neighbors: open the notebook and line the day up against the night. It never writes down a secret. Those are still yours, to tell… or to make up.

Call LIAR! and get it right, and you win more than the shot: you cross the street, lean on the fence and search the liar's garden. Bomb or no bomb — only you know. The whole street watched you look.

And when a house blows up, nobody pays a thing: the street shuffles out in its pajamas and walks to the round table for the Assembly. Everyone votes for someone or for SKIP — and only a neighbor with more votes than SKIP and than anyone else dies. Sometimes the table fires. Sometimes it just shrugs — and the impostor heard every word.

When talking stops working, call the meeting

Six coins stop the day cold. Everyone puffs into a little cloud and reappears at the round table in the plaza, under a dramatic sunset. Forty-five seconds of open-voice argument, fifteen of voting — and whoever the table condemns loses EVERY life to a cartoon firing squad.

Then their role is revealed. Good luck explaining yourself if you got it wrong.

And at the end, the paper tells all

When the match ends, an extra edition of The Neighbourhood News goes out to everybody, living or dead: who was who, what each neighbor declared and what they really held, day by day and night by night, and the headline of the match. That bluff nobody caught? It's in print. With your name on it.

Seven cards, day and night — and a lot more in Advanced

Every card does one thing by day and something completely different at night. The card you burn bluffing in daylight is the one you cannot use for real after dark. In Advanced each one also has a STREET trick — some you trigger, some fire by themselves — and card answers card: every day play but the Citizen's can be RESPONDED to by one specific card. Two triangles to draw in your head, not a table to memorise.

• Vigilante — sentences someone to the plaza cell by day and walks them in at nightfall, in front of everybody; poisons whoever slipped out to do harm at night; and out on the pavement runs the ROUND: reads a house's bombs, how many and from which night. Answers the Thief.
  
• Protector — grants immunity by day; makes a house bomb-proof at night; and simply by sitting in your hand it seals the block: peeks at you, or at any Citizen or Investor beside you, fail in silence. Answers the Reckless.
  
• Reckless — by day it is hot potato: the card he just played goes to you and a random one of yours comes back; by night he swaps entire hands — the street only learns that somebody swapped; and every so often a peek slips out of him that even he never sees. Answers the Investigator.
  
• Investor — invests this round's coin to collect four later; heads to the casino at night and bets big; and the floor of that bet is how far he walked the neighborhood that day. Answers the Vigilante.
  
• Investigator — peeks at one card by day; stakes out a house at night and sees everyone who walked in; and if somebody goes through his hand, he gets their NAME. Answers the Protector.
  
• Thief — steals coins by day; sabotages someone at night, and their next play goes off at random targets without a soul noticing; and on the street he has the QUICK EYE: one drawn card out of a neighbor's hand. Answers the Investor.
  
• Citizen — rests like a good neighbor and earns a coin. At night he serves lemonade on the porch to his honest visitors — and counts how many crept into the yard to do harm, without knowing who. He answers nobody and nobody answers him. The perfect bait: accuse a real Citizen and you lose a heart for nothing.

Classic or Advanced

Classic is the whole game without the street and the responses: the cards with their day and night, the bluff, the search, the notebook, the assembly and the paper, and nothing else. It is the game of public rooms and quick match, and the way in. After five finished matches, Advanced opens up: the Spy, the street tricks and the responses. The host picks in the lobby — and the whole table plays what the host picked.

Sit down at a table in one click

Quick match looks for a public room in your language, fullest first; if there is none, it opens one. A public room starts on its own once four people arrive, and bot neighbors fill the empty seats. With friends, open a friends-only or private room and invite them through the Steam overlay.

Neighbors who think

The bots do not cheat: each one decides only from what its own seat can see — just like you. They remember what you swore, accuse with a reason, vote on suspicion, bluff at the rate of their role and drop a line in the chat now and then. Any of them might be the impostor. Three levels: Easygoing, Neighborly and Suspicious. And practice with bots works on its own, with no internet: just downloaded it? Play a whole match against the street.

Voice over Steam, the way a street talks

By day, voice is proximity: full next to your bean, fading with distance — walking off in pairs is whispering. Whoever is at the table speaks into the microphone to the whole street. At the meeting and the assembly, everyone hears everyone. At night, silence. Voice travels over Steam's network through the host, who hands each line only to those allowed to hear it — nobody receives anybody's address. Public rooms default to push-to-talk.

There is something to do out there

Twelve toys scattered down the street — a playground, a trampoline, a fire hydrant, a fallen bicycle — and a neon-lit casino on the corner, with a roulette wheel, a one-armed bandit and dice out on the pavement.

What's in the box

• 4 to 12 players online: quick match, public rooms, friends' rooms and Steam overlay invites.
  
• Practice with bots, no internet needed, at three difficulty levels.
  
• Two games: Classic to start with, and Advanced with the street and the responses — unlocked after 5 matches.
  
• In-game voice over Steam: proximity by day, global at the meetings, muted at night. Push-to-talk optional.
  
• Text chat with a separate channel for the dead — who see everything and may tell no one — and an emote wheel.
  
• The Neighbourhood Notebook during the match and The Neighbourhood News at the end.
  
• Full controller support, from the menu to the victory, with an on-screen keyboard — and it plays on Steam Deck through Proton.
  
• Accessibility: interface size, colorblind mode, steady camera and adjustable screen shake, per-channel volume, remappable keys, bot level and fast animations.
  
• 12 colors and 12 accessories unlocked by playing. No in-game purchases, ever.
  
• 15 achievements, some more embarrassing than others.
  
• A step-by-step guided tutorial that freezes the game while you learn, and an illustrated manual one key away.
  
• Eight languages — English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), French, German, Russian and Simplified Chinese — interface and subtitles, from day one.

One last thing

You will lie to your friends. They will lie to you. Somebody is going to blow up their own house by mistake — and the paper will put it on the front page.

That's the game.