Skip to main content

Review #34: The Resistance - Avalon

# of Players: 5-10
Playtime: 30-60 Minutes
Core Mechanic: Deduction
Theme: Medieval
Type: Party
Weight: Light
Year: 2012

Rating: 9*

After I discovered Ultimate Werewolf and played it many times, I started looking out for other social deduction games. The Resistance was a game that was just released and was receiving rave reviews. Of course, the game I am reviewing in this post isn't The Resistance but instead its follow-up The Resistance: Avalon; still, I thought it would be helpful to provide a bit of background. Anyway, my original plays of The Resistance fell flat for the group I was playing with but I saw the potential based on the rules and was still looking to try it some more. Then I found out about the Avalon re-theme and that it added some special characters to help boost the game a bit.


There are two factions in the game - Good and Evil. To win the game, members of Good must complete three quests successfully while members of Evil win if three quests fail, if they assassinate Merlin at the end of the game, or if a quest cannot even begin. At the start of the game, each player is handed a card with their secret identity. Then everyone closes their eyes and the players on Evil will open their eyes so that they know who else is on their team. After closing their eyes, Merlin will open his eyes to see who the players on Evil are. After everyone opens their eyes, now it is time to go on a quest!

The game will take place over several rounds, with each round featuring a Team Building phase and a Quest phase. Each round will have a leader who will first try to build a team to go on the quest during the first phase. The number of players that will make up the team will vary depending on the round and number of players overall. The leader will nominate the players to go on the quest by giving each member a team token. If you are on Good, you are trying to pick people who you think are on the same team to go on this quest. That is because during the quest phase, each player secretly decides whether the quest will succeed or fail. In almost all cases, players who are Good will vote for the quest to succeed. However, if someone from Evil sneaks in, all it takes is for one fail vote for the entire quest to fail.


Back to the Team Building phase, once the leader has given out the required team tokens, everyone votes on whether that team will go on the quest. If the majority is a positive vote, then the team build is a success and the next phase of the round occurs. However, if the majority does not pass the team, the leader token gets passed to the next player in clockwise order, who nominates a new team. If this fails five times in a row, Evil automatically wins the game. I don't think I've had a game where this happens because eventually Good will pass any team to avoid this result.

I already touched on the Quest phase a couple paragraphs above so I won't go into it again. As mentioned earlier, Good has to successfully complete three quests to win. However, even if they do, Evil still has a chance to prevail if they can successfully guess who Merlin is. This allows Evil to stay in the game until the end, even if they have been playing poorly earlier and were revealed. At first glance, this seems to be a bit of a scapegoat for Evil and would seem to be an anti-climatic way to end the game, but in practice it works well to keep Merlin hidden.


Once you get bored of the base game, there are many optional cards that can be added to the game to spice things up. Percival is on the side of Good and knows who Merlin is from the start of the game. To help Evil, Mordred can be used and will not be seen by Merlin at the start of the game. Another character is Oberon, who is on Evil but acts independently, not knowing who else is on the team of Evil and with the rest of the Evil team not knowing who he is. Finally, Morgana, who is on the side of Evil, appears to Percival as Merlin, which creates confusion for whoever is playing Percival.

Regardless if you are playing with the extra characters or not, this game is extremely tight. There is enough information that with enough time you should be able to logically work out the teams, which is why the Merlin element helps keep Evil in the game. I think it is the most pure social deduction game out there and while it does not have the laugh out loud moments or intense debates that other games might spark, it has depth and strategy that I love. This depth and strategy means that it is heavier than a gateway, so it would make it a good candidate for the Middleweight and Heavyweight collections. As such, this also means it is perfect member of the Essential and Collector collections. The theme is the only drawback, even though it offers to some an improvement over the original dystopian theme -werewolves and nazis will probably always be more popular. Still, I haven't gotten to reviewing those games yet and every collection needs a solid social deduction game.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review #27: Ultimate Werewolf: Deluxe Edition

# of Players:  5-75 Playtime:  30-60 Minutes Core Mechanic:  Deduction Theme:  Werewolf Type:  Party Weight:  Light Year:  2014 Rating: 7.5* This was the first social deduction game that I played and the most memorable social deduction moments may have come from playing this game - and I may never play it again. I'll elaborate on that more in a bit, but it in no way reflects on the quality of the game, which is very, very good. This game opened up the entire genre to me which is now a party staple and most deduction games can probably trace a big part of their game back to Werewolf. I might have played Mafia a couple times with a deck of regular playing cards, which is very similar to Werewolf, but the fact that I'm not certain just shows how much of an impact Werewolf had by comparison. There are two teams in this game - Werewolves and Villagers. The goal for the villagers is to eliminate the werewolves while the goal for...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review #12: A Few Acres of Snow

# of Players: 2 Playtime:  2-3 Hours Core Mechanic: Deck Building/Area Control Theme:  18th Century North America Type: War Weight:  Heavy Year:  2011 Rating: 8* After discovering how fantastic a two-player game could be with Twilight Struggle, I was in search of something similar.  Around this time, A Few Acres of Snow was released and had just made its way into the Top 50 on BGG.  There was a lot of hype surrounding this release and I gave in, especially as people were calling this Martin Wallace’s take on Dominion, which was a game that I really liked at the time. Set in North America during the 17th and 18th centuries, one player is the British Empire while the other player is France.  The game is played over a map with each player building up a deck of cards consisting of either empire or location cards.  Location cards will be used to settle new villages, upgrade villages, build fortifications, and siege your op...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review #2: Hive

# of Players: 2 Playtime: 0-30 minutes Core Mechanic: Tile Placement Theme:  Insects Type: Abstract Weight: Light-Medium Year:  2001 Rating: 8* Place a tile or move a tile you've already placed. Protect your queen. Surround your opponent's queen. That's it. Very simple rules but underneath these rules is a very deep and tactical experience. This abstract tile placement game has held off most newcomers and as of this review sits just outside of the Top 10 Abstract Games and Top 200 Games of All-Time on BoardGameGeek over 15 years since it's release. Impressive. This game is themed around a hive of insects protecting its own queen and attacking the enemy's (by surrounding it). As mentioned already, you and your opponent will be alternating turns, either placing a new hex tile into hive or moving an old one, until all six sides of one queen is surrounded either by friend or for and loses the game. With the exception of the first tur...
Post a Comment
Read more