Detecting lies, reading people’s ulterior motives, negotiating, deducing, bonding a team and deceiving: that’s what The Resistance: Avalon (from now on, just “Avalon”) is all about.
This is a great 5-10 player game for practicing you people skills. Summarized, the game goes like this:
- Each player is dealt a random character (card), which will belong either to the Good or Bad team; each player will keep his character secret throughout the game. The Good team members will not know to which team the other players belong to, but the Bad (which are a minority) do from the begining of the game.
- For several rounds (depending on the number of players), all players will vote which subgroup of players will go on a mission; then, that subgroup will vote if they make that mission a success or a failure. The Good players will want to make the mission a success, and the Bad players a failure; but if even just one of the players votes the mission a failure, it will fail. So the idea of the Good team is to not have Bad players on the mission groups, and that of the Bad team is to “infiltrate” at least one of their players.
- There are exceptions to these rules because some of the characters are special (the general rules of others do not apply to them). For a full explanation of the rules, here is a review of Avalon by The Dice Tower.
So, here are the things I love about the game and why I think it’s such a great “make me better” game:
- If you’re on the Bad team, you’re going to have to pretend you’re Good; and if you’re Good, also. So it’s kind of like jail, were everyone says they’re innocent (I guess :D). And you better be good at selling it. You might even pretend to be Merlin (one of the special characters from the Good team), in which case you’d be impersonating someone in particular, who has a specific goal.
- If you’re on the Good team, you’re doing two things at the same time: figuring out who’s pretending (by their body language, verbally, etc.) and deducing who is making missions fail depending on the members of unfruitful missions.
- No matter what team you’re on, there’s something interesting for you to do. And you’re going to do it as a team, so there’s a lot of socializing and open discussions on who is who going on.
From my experience with this game, I only have one con: a bad Merlin can ruin the game for the Good team. On this note, I wonder if there are similar games where there is no teamwork involved, you depend solely on your own skills…
Here is a match of The Resistance from Geek & Sundy, the predecessor of Avalon (it has the same rules on a different context).