How to Play Among Us in Real Life
We’re all imagining about it.
Among Us, the famous multiplayer video game that has won over all of our lives during the extent of quarantine and social distancing was brought to life by my friend group this past weekend. Following weeks of playing this video game together in our college community space, we decided to craft an IRL version to play on Halloween (rather than partying and possibly getting the corona).
A handful of us came up with tasks, gathered supplies, play-tested the in-person chaos, and finally reached a fully recognized game. It took us roughly a week of prep overall. On Saturday night, my entire friend group, outfitted as the virtual game characters, made the trek up to the academic building at our campus that we have a 24-hour entree.
Following an hour of set-up, we were ready for gameplay. Moreover, it was very hoot.
Unfortunately, it got to an end more quickly than we had expected. After five rounds, we were reasonably drained (and incredibly moist) from the exercise of running up and down flights of stairs to reach our tasks, running from Impostors, plus playing inside full costumes. Thus we had to call it a night.
I’m not sure if we will get any chance to play again before we travel back to our respective homes during winter break. Therefore I’ve decided to feature our gameplay if anyone might be interested in testing it out with their quarantine pods.
Most of it was our thinking, though we could also utilize a few ideas from this Reddit thread.
Special Real Life Setting
At 11 pm, we played inside a three-story academic building on our college campus with two basements. (The cellars had the equal absurdly high risk of murder as the virtual “Electrical” does.) This was great for playing while distanced and masked. We could also set up and tidy up without bothering anyone (or trashing anyone’s house). The area could easily be scaled down to some home or up to an office space. Whatever runs for your posse!
Costumes
We costumed up as close as we can get to our video game characters. My character was brown with bear ears. Therefore I wore only brown and fixed my hair into buns. One person crocheted a flower to meet her virtual counterpart. Another friend owned a gladiator helmet lying around that matched his character appearance exceptionally well. A different person ordered horns online for her appearance. Someone else had leaves in their hair to equal the sprout hat. At the very least, everyone matched their virtual character’s color scheme, and some of us decided to be extra. There were 8 of us in total.
Tasks
We could pull a few tasks from the virtual game, though with short funds (because of college), we had to be extra creative coming up with various new tasks based upon what we already had on campus and inside our dorm rooms. Tasks such as starting the reactor, the Medbay scan, plus shooting asteroids had to be deleted from the game, though we didn’t miss them much. The subsequent tasks what we ended up with:
- Fix wires. We drew two lines of four various colored points on the whiteboards in several classrooms. The task was to attach the dots pulled straight from the online game.
- Prime shields. This was also done on whiteboards. We drew the hexagons with a red whiteboard marker and randomly filled each of them before starting the game. The task was to erase specific filled-in bits of each shield.
- Send an email saying hi to a friend. This task was purely because we required another long task, plus my friend wanted to have several sweet emails in her inbox for the next morning. There’s a computer room in the academic building which we used to send messages in.
- Collect chestnuts and deposit them. We’re on a college campus in Oregon, so we have hundreds of chestnuts in the fall. We took around 20 of them, put them inside classrooms and around the halls, and had deposit sites for them.
- Unlock a combination lock. We wrote the three different numbers that opened the separate lock-in rooms, and this task was to collect the numbers and unlock the lock.
- Collect batteries to turn on string lights. Being college students, most of us have string lights. We took out the batteries, arranged them around, and placed the lights in difficult places like the stairwells. The task was to draw everything back together to turn the lights on.
Assigning Roles and Tasks
We wrote down each of these tasks on index cards with the rooms they could discover and put them in sandwich bags — one for short tasks and one for long tasks. We also had little cards that we would draw to tell us if we were an Impostor or a Crewmate. After drawing our tasks, we would save them in our pockets or bags. If there were only one Impostor, they would go about their job solo without a hitch. If we had two Impostors, we would have everyone close their eyes, then order the Impostors to open their eyes, make eye contact, and nod — this way, they knew which they were working with.
Crewmates
The Crewmates’ role was to do each of their tasks without being murdered and solve who the Impostor was. (Quick Note: I’m not going to put up phrases like “kill” and “murder” in quotes this whole time. Just know that no college students were harmed during the making in the gameplay of Among Us IRL.) Crewmates were allowed to move as fast as they fancied, but they weren’t allowed to talk outside of meetings. Crewmates called meetings and reported bodies using a walkie-talkie app, Voxer. If a Crewmate was killed, they would play dead till they were either found or till a meeting was called. At that point, they would go up to a whiteboard that had each of our names written down on it and cross off their name. After the meeting ended, they would be allowed to continue performing their tasks as a ghost.
Impostors
The Impostor’s job was to kill without being discovered. There was no sabotaging or venting because we couldn’t figure out how to do that without it growing incredibly apparent who the Impostor was. The Impostor kills by getting a Crewmate’s attention from a safe distance and making gunshot motions to them. Impostors were still assigned tasks, and they were allowed to complete them if they wanted. There was no need to fake any tasks. The Imposter had a 30-second kill cooldown that was left up to honor code for them to abide by. Speaking as an Impostor two out of the five rounds we have played took at least thirty seconds to find another person to murder. Our building was big. The kill distance was from approximately 6ft to 12ft away.
Meetings and Voting
We kept meetings in the main lobby of the academic building. We would begin by having all the dead cross off their names. We would then set a timer for a minute and a half to discuss what had gone on. We would also check off our names on the whiteboard when we have completed each of our tasks. (The Impostor must check off their name on the whiteboard.) The Impostors and Crewmates would decide to vote or not after the time was up by counting to three and then point at the person they wanted to kick out (or at the ground if they wished to skip.) If there were a majority, the player would be ejected. We confirmed ejects only if we were down to several players where the game would end based on the vote. Everyone was allowed to call one emergency meeting each.
Crewmate Deaths
This is where our group’s theatre background got to shine. We have three active theatre kids in our group, and the remainder of us are ex-theatre kids, D&D players, or theatre-adjacent in different ways, so we had especially dramatic deaths. If an Impostor walked up and murdered you, you had to fall to the ground as overdramatically as possible and lay there until your body was found, or a meeting was called. Dead crewmates were allowed to make one loud, alarming sound to attract crewmates to their bodies without scaring anyone. Dead crewmates were allowed to give their “last words” as long as they weren’t giving the Impostor away. When I was an Impostor and very clearly about to lose the game, I wasted half of the couple we have in our friend group. The boyfriend got to dramatically died in his girlfriend’s arms (FYI: they’re in the same quarantine pod, so the lack of social distancing was acceptable) and gave her his last words. It was hilarious and very adorable.
Setting Up, Resetting, and Cleaning Up
It took us about an hour to set up each of the tasks. We would reset whatever tasks we had been assigned after each round finished (i.e., “undoing” the wires, resetting the batteries to all the string lights, putting the chestnuts back in their respective locations, etc.). If a round seemed particularly hopeless for the Crewmates, the ghosts would start to reset their tasks while the game was still going on. We erased everything we’d put onto the classroom whiteboards for clean-up, collected our supplies, and made sure that we had each of our index cards. It was surprisingly doable.
Our Among Us IRL was a blast, and I hope my explanation was detailed enough for others to follow and create. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments. Happy 2021, and good luck playing!
