On the evening of Wednesday, October 14, a small town will convene inside a fantasy tavern in downtown Urbana, and by the time the night is over, someone among the townsfolk will have been lying to everyone's face. The occasion is Blood on the Clocktower (in the Tower), a free evening of the immersive social deduction game hosted at Parcadia, the magical minigolf tavern at 302 N. Broadway Ave. The game runs from 6 to 8 p.m.
For the uninitiated, Blood on the Clocktower is not a board game in the conventional sense. It is a game of murder and mystery played seated in a circle, in which every player receives a secret character token — either good or evil — with its own ability, its own information, and its own reasons to be careful about whom to trust. A neutral gamemaster called the Storyteller runs the whole affair, waking players one at a time in the dead of night to gather clues, spread mischief, or kill. Good players try to piece together what they know, trust each other, and execute the Demon. Evil players try to sow distrust, evade detection, and wipe out the town. The game was created by Steven Medway and published by The Pandemonium Institute, the Sydney-based company founded in 2019 with the goal of getting the game out into the world. It was released in board game format in 2022, first via Kickstarter, complete with more than 300 crafted tokens and three distinct editions. It has since become a fixture of the social deduction scene, played in person, online through community apps, and streamed on Twitch.
What sets Clocktower apart from the Mafia and Werewolf games it descends from is a single, elegant twist: death is not the end. A player executed by their own allies keeps playing — they simply lose their vote and their ability, but they can still talk, still scheme, still influence the living from beyond the grave. That one rule transforms the game from a process of elimination into something stranger and more theatrical, where the dead become a chorus of unreliable narrators. The game also scales unusually well, accommodating anywhere from five to twenty players, which makes it a natural fit for a public game night where the headcount is never certain.
The setting for this particular session is a story in its own right. Parcadia is the long-gestating project of Chris and Anne Lukeman, the owners of CU Adventures in Time & Space, the escape room business in downtown Urbana. The Lukemans spent years building Parcadia — a 16,000-square-foot fantasy-themed minigolf tavern in the same building as their escape rooms — and spoke openly about applying everything they had learned designing escape rooms to the creation of a minigolf experience unlike anything else in the country. The venue opened its doors in 2026 with an introductory course called Into the Mysterious Mine, a puzzle hunt included with every round of golf, interactive effects and moving creatures, and a full tavern menu of craft cocktails, beer, wine, and zero-proof drinks alongside an all-ages menu of dirty sodas and coffee drinks. A second course, the Rift, is still being built out. The venue is all ages until 9 p.m., then adults only.
That combination — a fantasy tavern with a board game collection, a puzzle-hunt ethos, and a bar — is close to an ideal venue for Clocktower, a game that lives or dies on atmosphere and on players being willing to commit to the fiction. The event's own description leans into that, inviting newcomers as readily as veterans of Ravenswood Bluff, the fictional town where the game's story begins with a murdered storyteller found hanging from a clocktower. Rules will be taught before play begins, so no prior experience is required. The listing promises the full range of Clocktower experiences: being a fortune teller closing in on the Demon, secretly serving evil while protesting your innocence, pulling off a bluff that saves your team, or finding yourself executed by your own allies and continuing to meddle from the grave.
One detail worth flagging for anyone planning to attend: the event's admission is listed as free on the primary listing, while at least one other calendar entry for the same event shows a five-dollar charge. Prospective players may want to confirm the cost directly with the venue before the night arrives. The organizer is also listed only through the Chambana Events aggregator rather than a named host or Storyteller, so the specific person running the game is not publicly identified.
What is clear is the shape of the evening. A group of strangers and friends will sit down in a themed tavern, be handed secret roles, and spend two hours deciding how much to believe one another. Some will lie beautifully. Some will be caught. Some will die and keep talking anyway. It is, in the end, exactly the kind of participatory, low-stakes, high-drama night that a place like Parcadia was built to host — a game about trust, played in a building designed to make you forget you are in central Illinois.