CHENNAI: Hidden-role games are all the rage right now; but, as they involve a healthy helping of deception, bluffing, trickery and outright lying, they’re not for everybody. That said, if you and your group are up for it, there are few games out there that can stand alongside the modern classic that is The Resistance: Avalon.
Both the original The Resistance and its rethemed sequel, Avalon, feature the same broad strokes — you and your friends are a group who have to undertake a series of missions/quests. Only a few of you will go on each mission, selected by that round’s leader, and each player on a mission has the opportunity to play a card that ensures that the entire mission fails. If the good guys succeed at three missions, they win; if the traitors in their midst manage to ensure that three missions fail, they win.
The Resistance had a dystopian futuristic theme, with spies attempting to infiltrate a cell of the resistance; while Avalon made all the players knights of King Arthur, although some were secretly minions of Mordred instead, who wanted to see Camelot burn. Apart from the difference in theme, Avalon adds one significant element that vastly improves upon its predecessor — special abilities. In every game, one of the loyal players will be Merlin and one of the minions will be the Assassin. Merlin gets to know who the bad guys are, and you might think that that gives the good guys a tremendous advantage. The problem is the Assassin, however, who can win the game for his/her side in a last-ditch effort by correctly identifying Merlin at the end of the game (even if the good guys have succeeded at three missions!)
As a loyal servant of Arthur, Avalon is more about deduction and reading your fellow players. As a minion, it’s all about deception — you’re going to have to fail a mission sooner or later, and you have to try to ensure that suspicion falls on anybody else who went on that mission but you. Lie successfully, and you’ll have to make sure your triumph doesn’t show as the rest of the table rounds on your hapless victim. But lie and fail, and that’s when the fox is well and truly in the henhouse. You’ll never convince everybody — Merlin is always watching, remember — but if you manage to sow enough distrust around the table, you can negate that advantage. The sweetest victory I ever had as a traitor was when we managed to convince our fellow knights that Merlin was the evildoer.
That was a beautiful moment; and that, ultimately, is what The Resistance: Avalon is all about. Moments like the time two traitors were sent on a 2-man quest and both of them played Success cards, winning the game for the good guys. Moments like the heated argument over a guy’s loyalty, in which his best friend who’s known him all his life yelled “YOU HAVE AN EVIL FACE!” when plaintively asked why he didn’t trust him. Moments like when a new player who was loyal decided to fail a mission just, and I quote, “to shake things up a little”. All of these actually happened, in some cases years ago, and we’re still laughing about them.
That’s what The Resistance is all about. You’ll get that with the base game, but the Avalon variant adds more complex roles to hide, a little more depth, and as one of my favourite board game sites put it, ‘it’s got bloody Merlin in it’.