Among Us has been quite the popular game this year, and so this issue we wanted to bring to you an assortment of big brain strategies, for both Crewmates and Impostors, to take into your Among Us lobbies.

For those of you who haven’t played Among Us before, it’s a video game in which up to ten players have to complete tasks aboard a spaceship while figuring out which players are secretly killing off the entire crew. It’s a super fun game to play with a group of friends, especially when you’re poking a hole or twenty in them with a knife.

In this guide we will try to cover some lesser known strategies—so hopefully veterans and noobs alike can learn something!

Tasks

As a Crewmate your job is to do your tasks and eject Impostors out the airlock. So how can you differentiate between a friend and a knife-wielding, gun-slinging, spear-tongued serial killer? While almost every serial killer has their individual tells that you can figure out if you’ve played with them a lot, there are some patterns of play that almost always belong to an Impostor. A large number of these relate to tasks.

Most Impostors will pretend to do tasks in order to fit in with the rest of the crew. They may, however, expose themselves if they fake them incorrectly.

Less experienced Impostors might be caught faking a common task that the rest of the crew has. Common tasks are tasks that either everybody has or nobody has, such as the Card Swipe task or Fix Wiring. If you’re a Crewmate and don’t have the Card Swipe, but you spot Yellow standing at the card reader, tell the crew and vote them out. Do the same thing if you see that Yellow doesn’t do a common task that everybody else has.

Some tasks have multiple parts to them—for example, if you do a download task on Skeld, you always have to go to Admin to upload afterwards. If you see Yellow do a download download in Communications, then walk up to Admin but blatantly ignore the upload task, then smash the button and toss them into the frozen void of space. For this reason, you should remember the different parts of all the tasks, so that you can expose traitors or fake them correctly if you yourself are an Impostor.

The safest task to fake as an Impostor is probably Fix Wiring, because few people are able to tell if the task is being faked. However there is actually a way to tell—a method that only 10,000 IQ detectives know about. There is a specific order in which all Fix Wiring tasks are done:

(Skeld) Electrical > Storage > Admin > Navigation > Cafeteria > Security

(Mira HQ) Storage > Hallway > Locker > Greenhouse > Laboratory

(Polus) Electrical > O2 > Office > Decontamination > Laboratory > Bathrooms

When a person is assigned a Fix Wiring task, they will be given three random locations where the task will occur at. However, the order in which they do those tasks must match the order written above. If you’re playing on Mira HQ, and you are given the Wiring tasks at Storage, Hallway, and Greenhouse, they will occur in that exact order, and that exact order only. Wires at Storage can never come after any other location, and similarly wires at Laboratory can never come before any other location. The task can never begin at Greenhouse or Laboratory, since there would not be enough locations to meet the quota of three parts per Wiring Task, and the task can never end at Storage or Hallway for the same reason. If someone’s Wiring path doesn’t match up with the ordering, then you’d better get rid of them, just to be safe.

There are a few more strategies you can employ in sniffing out the murderers. You can count the seconds it takes someone to finish a task to make sure they aren’t doing it too quickly or too slowly. If a meeting occurs while someone is in the middle of their task, you can check if they return to it afterwards. Finally, you can count the number of short and long tasks that a player has done and see if it matches up with the settings of the lobby.

Camping

As a Crewmate, there are ways to gather information other than watching people do tasks. Manning the Security Cameras (or Door Logs on Mira) is a great way to map out everyone’s positions, and if you’re lucky you might even catch a murder in HD.

However, watching the Admin Panel is arguably the most powerful tool for gathering information. One of the greatest weaknesses of watching the Security Cameras is that it leaves you extremely vulnerable to getting killed. Admin Panel on the other hand, is usually located in a high traffic area, which makes it harder for an Impostor to punish you for remaining in the same place for a long time. The Admin Panel also offers much more information about player positioning than Security Cameras do, allowing you to make a variety of deductions. If someone’s alone in a room for a long time, they might be dead. If four people are in the same room together, it could mean a double kill is about to happen. If someone leaves Electrical just as someone enters Medbay, that could be someone crawling through the vents. By simply having information about where everybody was at any given time, you can confirm truths and expose lies and narrow the range of suspects.

Another great camping strat is vent watching, in which you hide near a vent and catch Impostors in the act of venting. Every map has some vent watching spots—here’s a good one on Skeld (see Figure 1).

The last camping strategy we would recommend is camping Lights. Since the Lights sabotage is so often used (for good reason), being able to fix Lights almost immediately after they go down can light up the crime before the Impostor slips away.

Sneaky Kills

A good Impostor kills and escapes suspicion. A great Impostor kills, escapes suspicion, and pins the crime on the innocent. The only problem is that framing someone either requires a great deal of luck, or a great deal of risk. But with enough skill (and a decent amount of luck), you can make some incredibly powerful ninja kills that throw the entire lobby into confusion.

If you’re looking to frame someone, killing people under a task window is a great way to do it. For example, if you see two people in Security, and at least one of them is watching Security Cameras, you can vent in, kill the other, and vent back out. The person watching Security Cameras won’t be able to see a thing due to the task window, and with luck someone will walk in on them standing right next to a dead body. The same can be done at various Download tasks around the map or even at Sabotages (see Figure 2 and Figure 3).

There are so many different task windows that you can kill under—experiment in freeplay mode to see what kind of risky kills you can get away with.

Tips & Tricks

Here are some final tips & tricks that’ll help you further improve your chances of winning:

1. If you have the Medbay Scan task, you should try to find others who also have it. You can clear each other by attempting to scan at the same time. If your friend is genuinely doing the Medbay scan task, you will have to wait for them to finish before you can start yours. If they are faking the Medbay task, then you will not have to wait.

2. If you’re an Impostor with a teammate, you should watch your “Kill’ button. It will flicker when your partner has killed someone. This is extremely useful for knowing how many more Crewmates need to be killed before the Impostors win.

3. When you’re a Crewmate in a group of four, spam your report button. That way you can interrupt an attempted double kill.

And that’s the end of Cuspidor’s big brain Among Us strategy guide. We hope the strategies we shared helped you get that sweet Victory screen—and most importantly, we hope you had fun!

Thanks for reading.