LogFAQs > #968912876

9. Resistance: Avalon

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/128882/resistance-avalon

Category: Team vs team
Key mechanics: Hidden roles, social deduction, voting
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30-60 minutes
First played: 2013
Experience: 100+ plays with 5-10 players

In Resistance: Avalon, players are secretly divided into a blind majority (good team, knights of Arthur) and a minority that knows one another (evil team, minions of Mordred). The game is contested over five missions. During a round, a rotating "leader" nominates a team of players to execute the mission - but all players then get to publicly vote on whether or not the nominated team is approved to execute the mission. Good players win a mission if all the players on an approved team secretly vote for success.

Avalon is the first game that really brought me into "the hobby." Coming from a mafia background, it has some very obvious appeal - public voting, an informed majority vs an uninformed minority, potential for high emotions. Avalon "improves" over mafia by being better at a smaller player count and not having player elimination - by far the part of mafia that can most ruin your game. Compared to base Resistance, Avalon also introduces the Merlin role, which is something like the cop in mafia, with the caveat that Merlin, if guessed by evil, will automatically lose the game for the good team.

Further strengthening Avalon is the variety of different roles that you can optionally add to balance things out. I almost always play with Merlin, Percival, and Morgana; however, Mordred can strengthen the bad team in a favorable player-count for good, Oberon can weaken the bad team in a favorable player-count for bad, and the Lady of the Lake can be used in desperate straits of an 8- or 10-player game to add more dynamic information to the game. These little added complexities and information dials really allow you to fine-tune your experience. (My favorite configuration is to include Merlin, Percival, Morgana, Mordred, and Oberon in a 7- or 8-player game.)

It's hard to overstate how important of a game Avalon was to me in terms of my life. By playing Avalon, I directly met the friends who would introduce me to my other board gaming friends, and that is now my primary friend group in my city. And of course, tabletop gaming is now probably my most important hobby, because of how easily it can be shared among somewhat-like-minded individuals. And at the time, Avalon was all I wanted to play - I'd bring it to any occasion where we expected more than five people would get together. I felt like I could learn a lot about how a person thought based on how they played Avalon.

These days, I understand the game is not for everyone, and my passion for arguing has also waned a lot. My partner isn't a big fan of lying games, and I entirely respect that. My closest board gaming friends are also not so much into arguing, preferring indirect interaction and simply playing rather than being confrontational and debating with a crowd. But while the game doesn't make it off my shelf as much, I still greatly admire its design, and it occupies a large place in my heart.