How to boost your chances of being the Imposter in Among Us
There's good news and there's bad news.
The white-hot murder mystery game Among Us is all about schemes and subterfuge. At the start of each round, players are assigned one of two roles: either a "Crewmate" who has to complete simple tasks and survive, or the "Imposter" who must kill the crew.
Being the Imposter is the more exciting role, but a nerve-wracking one. Players must carefully plan out a series of murders while avoiding suspicion. There's nothing quite like the rush of successfully killing everyone in a round, or turning other players against each other.
Since the indie game's popularity in the second half of 2020, Among Us has seen several updates. The game came to Nintendo Switch and Xbox Game Pass for PC on December 15. Developer Innersloth has also confirmed plans to release the game for Xbox One and Xbox Series X in 2021.
Unfortunately, despite these new updates and ports, there's no way to guarantee being the Imposter every round. But still, there are some things you can do to increase your chances.
Among Us randomly selects what the players' role will be at the start of every match, meaning there's no special trick that players can use to influence their chances of being the Imposter in every lobby they join. While there's no garuntee, if you create your own private lobby there are a few ways you can increase the general odds of being becoming an Imposter. First, you'll have to play around with the settings.
There's no trick to increase your odds at becoming Imposter in public lobbies. But you can tweak some setting to up your odds in your own lobby.
Regardless of platform or setting, you will need more Crewmates than Imposters in order to start a match of Among Us. Beause of that and the random element mentioned above, it's always more likely that you'll be playing a Crewmate rather than an Imposter. Still, here are two ways you can improve those odds.
Increase the total number of Imposters
Currently, Among Us lets up to three players be Imposters per game if you adjust this in the game's setting. The number of Imposters can also be set to 1 or 2, but having more imposters increases your chances of becoming one. Enabling this setting while playing with a full group of 10 means there's a 3/10 chance that you will be an imposter.
Developer InnerSloth hasn't revealed any plans to increase that number in upcoming patches, so setting the number of Imposters to three is your best bet. Only the host of a private lobby can edit this setting by using the Customize laptop in the waiting room. Simply open the Game Tab and increase the "# Impostors" to 3 by selecting the + symbol. In a full game, that'll increase your chances from 10 percent to 30 percent.
Use the Customize laptop to increase the number of imposters per game.
As there can be a maximum of 10 players, that means Among Us games with these settings only require four Crewmate kills for a win. Games can end very quickly if the Crewmates don't weed out the Imposters fast enough, so shorter games are the biggest tradeoff of playing with more imposters.
You can attempt to balance this by increasing the Kill Cooldown from the Customization laptop, but any game with three Imposters is skewed in favor of the murderers. InnerSloth stated that they want to increase the size of lobbies to allow 12 to 15 players to join in a future update, but this has not happened yet.
If this update comes in 2021, possibly alongside the new map or Xbox version of the game, it would make three-Imposter games more balanced. At the same time though, it would technically decrease your chances of getting imposter. Until then, this is the best way to up the chances of becoming an Imposter.
Increasing the total number of imposters per game is the best way to increase your odds at becoming a murderer.
Start a game with fewer players
Alternatively, you can play with the minimum required amount of Crewmates and the maximum amount of Imposters, which would be three imposters and four crewmates for a total of seven players in a lobby. Simply put, you'll have a 3 out of 7 chance of being an imposter rather than a 3 out of 10 chance.
However, playing like this would mean the Imposters only need one kill to win, which once again means matches will conclude very quickly. Still, creating a lobby like this would ensure that you'd be an Imposter about 43 percent of the time. At the very least, it's a solid way to learn the mechanics of venting and sabotaging before you play as an Imposter in a more legitimate match.
If you don't want to tamper with the game's settings though, you'll just have to hope that Among Us gets some sort of role queue or easier way to become the Imposter in the future, though it's unlikely.
Among Us is available on PC, iOS, and Android.
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