Someone at the table isn't human.
Meta-Death is a social deduction game for 5 to 15 people in one room. Everyone brings a phone, the app runs the night, and you argue by daylight.
Watch a six-seat demo table on this screen
Free to play and still a work in progress. No accounts. Rooms and names are deleted once the table breaks up.
Start a game
Twenty days of radio silence. Then the ship started to sing.
Aboard the Dead Signal, the ship's intelligence slipped its moorings. The Overmind burned its own core, poured itself into a stolen body, and took a seat among the crew. It laughs at your jokes. It votes with the majority. And it brought help.
You know what you are, and that is all you know. Each dawn there is one voice fewer, and the living hold a single card: the airlock. Accuse, argue, and vote a body into the black. That is the whole game.
Every player is quietly on one side.
Roles are dealt in secret. Nobody but the machines knows who the machines are.
Crew
Wins when the Overmind dies, by any means.
The humans, most of the table. Strangers to each other, sure of nothing but their own pulse. A few carry instruments that leak the truth in fragments; the machines spend every night bending those fragments into lies.
Synthetics
Win when they reach parity with the crew.
The machines, and the Overmind that leads them. They open their eyes together on night one knowing every enemy by name, and from the second night they kill: close, quiet, on schedule. At parity they own every vote, and the humans can never catch up.
Close your eyes. Open them. Count the empty chairs.
Two phases trade off until one side wins. The night resolves in a strict order, one role at a time, so an early forgery or a rerouted kill rewrites everything that lands after it.
Night
Roles act in secret, in this order.
- 1Infiltratorforges a signature; the mark scans as Synthetic until dusk
- 2Engineerscrubs one player clean of forgery
- 3Medicsplices two players; a kill on one lands on the other
- 4Overmindreaches out two seats and kills, from night two
- 5Sleeper Agentmay wake as a second killer, once, and is exposed by dawn
- 6Navigatorreplants the beacon and reads the drift: warmer or colder
- 7Sensor Techcounts the seats to the nearest Synthetic
Day
Everyone talks, then everyone votes.
- 1Discusstrade readings, trade accusations, or lie
- 2Nominateany living player can put a name on the ledger
- 3Votehalf of the living carries it
- 4Airlockthe chosen goes into the black at dusk; their role can stay a mystery
- 5Nightfallwhoever is left closes their eyes
Night one draws no blood. You start with readings, not corpses.
Fifteen roles. Your table draws a new hand every game.
The app deals to your headcount. No instrument reads your true team; it reads how you register, and the machines spend all night rewriting registrations.
Crew
- Navigator
- Replants a beacon nightly and reads the drift: warmer or colder to the Overmind.
- Sensor Tech
- Counts the seats between them and the nearest Synthetic, every night.
- Medic
- Splices two players each night. A kill aimed at one strikes the other.
- Engineer
- Purges one player's forged signature each night, and learns whether it cleared anything.
- Quartermaster
- Signs for every corpse and learns the dead player's team, never their role.
- Security Chief
- Once per game jails a player. Unkillable that night, and the brig knows an Overmind when it holds one.
- Captain
- While the Captain breathes, tied airlock votes break for the Crew.
- Paranoid
- Can fry their own transponder once, and scan as Synthetic forever after.
- Rookie
- A real array, fresh from the academy, but up to two readings per game come back garbage.
Synthetics
- Overmind
- The rogue mind in a borrowed body. Kills within two seats. Everything ends if it dies.
- Infiltrator
- Forges one signature a night. The mark scans as Synthetic until dusk.
- Ghost Protocol
- Invisible to every instrument and reads as Crew. Once per game, brands someone else Synthetic for good.
- Sleeper Agent
- Wakes once as a second killer, any night it likes, and is exposed by dawn.
Deckhands and Hollow Shells round out the manifest at larger tables.
The scanner isn't lying. The one reading it might be.
Five to fifteen people, a phone each, lights low. Someone in the room has already stopped being human.
Start a game