Half of Spain has gotten hooked this Christmas on a board game that is not a board game: ‘El Impostor’
The Impostor game has dominated Spanish family gatherings during the 2025 holidays, going massively viral on social networks and causing the downloads of mobile applications to multiply that adapt the rules of an entertainment that, in reality, can be played without any type of add-on. We’ve dug into its origins and impact to find out why it’s making a splash this Christmas. The phenomenon. While families gathered over nougat, a dynamic of social deduction as simple as it was addictive crept into the dinners, turning every word into suspicion and every look into infallible proof. This is not a new game, but its massive viralization through TikTok During December, downloads of specialized applications such as “Imposter – Party Game” in the App Store or “Imposter: Word Game” on Google Play. It has not been an exclusively Spanish phenomenon, as articles such as this one from a Mexican digital. But the practical reason for its success is very clear: very simple and quick to explain rules, guaranteed light psychological tension and no preparations, only a handful of people are needed. How to play. The game works through an information asymmetry that starts with all participants knowing a secret word (“meatballs”, “Cuenca” or “car)” except one player. Your survival depends on pretending you know the word. Each person must offer a clue related to the word without saying it directly, balancing being specific enough not to seem suspicious and vague enough not to give away the answer to the imposter. After the clue round, the players debate and vote who is the imposter. If he manages to go unnoticed, victory is his. It can be played with paper and a human moderator, but apps facilitate randomness and word choice, sometimes online, sometimes with a single device passed from hand to hand that secretly assigns roles, which speeds up the pace of the game. Origins of the game. These date back to 1986, to the classroom of a psychology student at Moscow State University named Dimitry Davidoff. It began as a pedagogical exercise to teach “visual psychodiagnoses” (the interpretation of body language and non-verbal signals) and was named “Mafia.” Popular Mechanics He said that Davidoff’s objective was to create “a conflict between an informed minority and an uninformed majority”, that is, between gangsters and innocent citizens. The werewolves arrive. The thematic leap that would define the game came a decade later, in 1997, when designer Andrew Plotkin invented a reconversion: the gangsters were transformed into werewolves, the citizens into medieval villagers, and the game cycle adopted the day/night structure that suited the lycanthropic transformations under the full moon. This version introduced the role of the Seer (a villager with the ability to investigate other people’s identities every night), adding an additional strategic layer. Over time, these games (which fall into the category of “social deduction titles”) have been examined under multiple academic lenses, from the playful to the psychological. For example, in 2024 a paper It explored optimal strategies from a game theory perspective and built mathematical models to calculate what strategies each faction should follow to win. Institutions such as MIT developed their own regulatory variants and experts such as those on the web No Rolls Barred They theorized that these games work because they operate in “an information asymmetry where knowing something that others don’t know becomes a currency of social exchange.” The ‘Among Us’ revolution. It was this seemingly modest video game that would catapult the genre into the global mainstream. Developed by the small studio InnerSloth, it was launched in June 2018 for mobile and PC and for almost two years it languished in obscurity, averaging between 30 and 50 players connected simultaneously, a number so discreet that the studio considered abandoning the project. But when Twitch streamer Sodapoppin discovered the game in July 2020 and hosted a four-plus hour session with other content creators, he set off a chain reaction which would lead ‘Among Us’ to reach 3.8 million concurrent players in September, a growth of 1600% in just eight months. It was then spoken of the opportuneness of timing pandemic, with the world in confinement: ‘Among Us’ offered a form of remote socialization that replicated the experience of board games but without the need for physical proximity. In addition, the game was very accessible economically and technically: free on mobile devices and only five dollars on PC, with very simple mechanics thanks to which anyone with a phone could participate. Third, finally, he was ideal for the streaming: Watching games of ‘Among Us’ was almost as entertaining as playing them. Additionally, the game refined the original mechanics: there were tasks that players had to complete while investigating, eliminating the role of passive eliminated players. The viralization. TikTok has established itself as the true catalyst for the Impostor’s Christmas explosion. Unlike ‘Among Us’, the Impostor found its perfect ecosystem in the short vertical videos of TikTok, with grandmothers accusing grandchildren, groups of friends yelling at each other and entire families breaking up with suspicious laughter. The platform functioned as a visual instruction manual and eliminated the barrier to entry that ‘Mafia’ and ‘Werewolf’ had historically had, as well as mechanically inspired board gameslike ‘Little Secret’ or ‘The Liar’. The secret of the game’s success is that it has transcended generations: a 70-year-old can lie as convincingly as a 15-year-old. Grandparents have learned from their grandchildren how the game worked, parents have discovered that their children lied terrifyingly well, leading to a curious reversal of the usual roles in the family. Quite a game. Header | Alvaro Garcia
