Traitors-style team building: how to run it, and when to hire a host
Every team-building activity promises communication and trust. A Traitors-style game is the one that actually tests them, because the whole game is listening to people, deciding whether to believe them, and persuading a room. Here is what it teaches, how to run one yourself, and the point at which you should hand it to a host.
Treachery! is our hosted version: 16–30 people a session, about 50 minutes, any room with chairs. It has run at Camp Wildfire every summer since 2024, and it is the game people ask us for by name. The do-it-yourself rules are further down; the honest answer on when to hire a host is at the end.
What a hidden-traitor game does to a team
A quiz tells you who knows things. A Traitors-style game tells you how people behave under mild, playful pressure, which is the useful kind of self-knowledge:
- Listening. You cannot find a traitor without hearing what people actually said, not what you expected them to say.
- Persuasion without authority. The intern can convince the room to vote out the director. Nobody's job title protects them.
- Reading a room. Who goes quiet when accused, who gets loud, who changes the subject. Teams talk about this for weeks.
- Losing well. Half the room is wrong in every vote. Being wrong in public, laughing about it and carrying on is a skill, and this is a safe place to practise it.
- Mixing. Everyone has a reason to talk to everyone, including the people they never sit near.
The debrief is where the team-building happens. Five minutes at the end: who did you trust, and why? Who did you get wrong? What did the traitors do that worked? It lands harder than any slide.
How to run it yourself
The full rules are in our Traitors-style party game rules, round by round. The short version for a work group:
- Choose the ratio. About a quarter to a third of the group are traitors. For 20 people, five or six.
- Hand out roles in secret. Folded slips of paper, or tap shoulders while eyes are closed.
- Night. Everyone closes their eyes; the traitors open theirs and agree on a victim.
- Day. The victim is announced. The room debates in pairs, then groups, then as one. Traitors must lie if asked directly.
- Vote. Peace or execution. Peace with a traitor still in play ends the game in the traitors' favour.
- Repeat until the traitors are all out or peace is called. Then the debrief.
Three things make or break it for a work group. Keep names visible (a whiteboard, crossed out as people go). Keep the tone playful: serious in the game, never personal. And have one person who is only the host and never a player, because the host sets the pace and the pace is everything.
When to hire a host
You can run this yourself for a team of up to about 16 who know each other. Hire a host when:
- There are more than about 16 people. The debate stops managing itself; it needs someone with a voice and a clock.
- You want to play. The person running it is the one person who can't, and that person is usually the organiser who most needed the break.
- The group is mixed. Different teams, different seniority, people who've never met. A host is neutral; the manager who runs it is not.
- It has a slot. A conference energiser at 2pm, a 50-minute gap before dinner. A host hits the time; a first-time host doesn't.
- It's the Christmas party. Nobody wants to be working at their own party. See how a Traitors-style Christmas party runs.
What a hosted session costs
Treachery! is from £20 a person with a minimum of £600 a session. One host runs up to 30 people in about 50 minutes, and the session repeats through a day for a bigger group: 150 at a conference is five sessions. No VAT to add. Travel outside London is extra, and tasks between rounds are an optional add-on, priced on request.
We come to you, so there's no venue to book: a meeting room, a function room or the office with the chairs moved. If you'd rather see it in a bigger list of options, our office Christmas party ideas for London puts it beside the quiz and the games night.