LogFAQs > #898638299

4. The Resistance: Avalon
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/128882/resistance-avalon

Genre/mechanics: Social deduction, hidden roles, team vs team, simultaneous voting
Rules complexity: 4/10
Game length: 20-60 minutes (depending on argumentativeness)
Player count: 5-10
Experience: 100+ plays with 5-10 players
First played: 2013

The Resistance is a social deduction game in the vein of Mafia, with hidden roles dealt to an informed minority team that knows one another (Evil) and an uninformed majority team that's mostly blind (Good).

The game is contested over five "missions," split between the team selection phase - where a rotating leader gets to pick a subgroup of players, which everyone at the table votes on - and the mission itself, during which each player secretly submits a success or a fail for the mission. A mission outcome with even one fail results in a mission failure, and three failures mean a bad team win.

In Avalon, special roles are added, with the the most important addition being Merlin, a Good guy who knows all of the Bad team - but who the Bad team can identify for an instant win condition.

Design - Before I gush all over my personal experiences with Avalon, I want explain why the game is so damn good. First off, it pretty much perfects the face-to-face Mafia experience for a limited number of players. No more player elimination to fuck you over, and a round timer limit. It's also a near-zero-luck game where you're always engaged (as the meat of the game is in reading others and discussing your findings), and you get to do something every turn, even if not talking - the vote on whether to allow a team to go through involves everyone.

And that includes if you're a good guy who's been arbitrarily labeled bad, or if you're a bad guy who got outed and no one trusts anymore. Maybe you don't get to have anyone listen to you anymore, but you can still affect the game's outcome with your voting tiles. Eliminating player elimination is brilliant.

The game gives some tension to the Bad teams when they're on a mission together. You usually want to strike a balance between having a mission fail, which advances the win condition, and buying trust, which enables you to fail more missions later. (The crux of the game is the idea of majority/minority - the good guys have a majority, so every election is controlled by at least one of the good guys.) If the two bad guys throw zero fail cards between the two of them, they may badly out themselves. But if they throw none between the two of them, you don't advance the winning condition, and you don't know how you'll coordinate going forward, either.

I alluded to Resistance fairly transparently during the first writeup in this topic (Secret Hitler). That game annoys me because it's all chrome and edgy theme. It takes Avalon, makes it worse, and then serves that shit to you on a more expensive platter.

Avalon is pure as fuck. You don't have anything fucking with you. You got the teams nominated, you got the voting patterns, you got what people say and how they act. You got good guys trying to figure out who bad guys are and bad guys trying to hide out and figure out who Merlin is. And that's it. The game gets out of the way and lets you play. You can tell that it's been playtested to death for tightness and balance - the five-mission structure that allows both teams to have chances for counterplay without dragging a game on inevitably; the increasing number of players that must go on each mission to ratchet up the tension; the must-approve-team-five rule that gives good guys incentive not to vote Reject.

Favorite player counts: 7 and 8. I like using Merlin, Percival, Mordred, Morgana, and Oberon in these games. At 10, removing Mordred and adding Lady of the Lake seems good - but I haven't played much ten-player lately.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness