LogFAQs > #940073141

4. The Resistance: Avalon (2012)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Hidden roles, social deduction, voting
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 25-40 minutes
Experience: 100+ plays with 5-10 players (2013-2019)
Previous ranks: 1/100 (2016), 4/80 (2018)

Description - Each player is assigned either to the Good Team (majority) or the Bad Team (minority, but know who one another are). The goal for each team is to win three of the five "missions." The missions are divided into a nomination step, when a leader nominates a team of players. Then there is the approval step, where every player gets to vote publicly on that team. If the team is approved by the populace, the team secretly votes on whether the mission will succeed (good team wins), with a single failing vote being required to fail the mission. Avalon's twist on the Resistance formula is Merlin, a good guy who secretly knows all the bad guys - but whom the bad guys can target to win the game.

Experience - More than any other game, Avalon is responsible for my modern board gaming. I used to play AIM and B8 mafia a ton when I had more time and patience and fire in my belly. While it isn't the same playing in person with people who don't play all day all the time, in-person mafia is how I played the first time; and after I moved on from online mafia, I did enjoy the occasional face-to-face game. In 2013, during a party with people I wasn't super-familiar with, I suggested we play mafia. Turns out the roommate of the host once played a lot of mafia online as well.

I hung onto that connection. Three months later, she invited me to join a game of Avalon. For a year, I'd play Avalon with that group. One of those friends is the one who introduced me to other hobby gamers and got me into the hobby. It got played probably hundreds of times those first few years. The pace has slowed now that I see those friends less and play more euros (and, to be honest, don't play at all during the quarantine) but it's still near and dear to my heart.

Design - For its ideal player counts - 7, 8, and 10 - there is no finer good vs bad social deduction game than Avalon. At all of these player counts, the good guys need to be perfect in order to win that fifth mission. Resistance was originally a derivative of mafia, and it perfectly captures that feeling of a battle of wits. As a bad guy, you need to deceive and mislead, while as a good guy, you need to suss out the lies and figure out whom to believe. And the only information you're given is the behavior of the other players - whom they believe, how they vote, and of course, what happens when the mission is approved. The best tension in the game comes from the dichotomy of the public vote, where it's all bluster but the truth is obscured, and the private mission, where you don't know who sabotaged a mission, but whether a mission succeeds or not is determined.

A few elements make Resistance better than Mafia. The first is that it can be played entirely without a moderator other than for someone to know the words to say before the game starts. Then there's the voting/leader system - while discussion is a free-for-all, the voting is structured as a simultaneous action, where you can easily tally a yes/no instead of letting everyone pick someone randomly. And tied to this is that there is no player elimination, which allows people even more effectively to lurk into the endgame.

You can of course player Avalon however you want. When I started out, I was all about the battle of wills - there's no stakes unless someone risks getting actually hurt in real life - and you can really see how people react when accused. By playing with players who are considerably less into the game, I've taken more of a laid back style and now tend to encourage quick votes with less confrontation. There's no way to pretend that the emotional investment of getting into each other's faces and fighting ot the death is more engaging, but a wider range of people is able to appreciate playing at a saner pace without hot tempers, and that is more important to me these days.

There are two design flaws in Avalon, to me. The first is that the Merlin mechanic is slightly an issue, because bad guys can win completely randomly. The implication here is that good guys should be winning three missions far more often than bad guys, if you want the overall win rate to be 50-50. (In recent years, we definitely prefer playing with the Oberon role, a bad guy who's unknown to other bad guys, and who therefore causes double-fails and bad guys succeeding on missions much more often.)

The second is not a game design flaw per se, but one that can impact your enjoyment of the game a lot: it's only as fun as the competence of the players. Unlike a worker placement game, Avalon is literally all interaction. Now you don't need to be best friends with everyone playing, but you do need to trust everyone to be playing somewhat competently. We sometimes do play with someone who just rarely ever talks, and when he talks, gives weak opinions. There's adding a wild card, and then there's adding someone who's mainly dead weight and isn't really contributing... but whose vote (and allegiance) need to be inferred or at least attempted, in order for the game to work. Playing Avalon with a bunch of non-gamers is also likely a no-go; if everyone votes Accept on every mission and questions only the people who reject the first mission, the game is very unlikely to have any space for strategic discussion.

Future - The fire doesn't burn as intensely, but I'm still ooking forward to the next time I have seven people who want to play Avalon.
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yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness