The Resistance: Avalon is a board game created in 2012 by designer Don Eskridge, intended to be played by 5-10 players who are above 13 years of age. It’s a game where players are randomly divided into Good and Evil sides and are assigned roles in secret, with some of them having special powers. The main part of the game is a series of quests where the bad guys try to join the mission team and fail the quests and the good guys try to prevent that from happening. It is not just a good game to play with friends and family, but can also be played among strangers as it does not require the players to know anything beyond the information in the game world.
The game has both physical and web versions. I played the physical version with friends but also observed people playing digitally. The physical version is better at engaging the players in communication, debating who’s on which side, negotiating with one another, and forming alliances, essentially promoting fellowship among players. The communication part is relatively lacking in the digital version, partly due to the fact that the communication happened through chat and partly because the game I observed was one where players don’t know each other. But the digital version has one benefit over the physical version, namely that it keeps track of the information for past quests, which greatly facilitates the deduction and helps prevent scenarios where people forget details from previous quests.
I argue that Avalon emphasizes social deduction through having players infer one another’s camp by making use of limited information provided by player interactions and the special powers of roles, in order to achieve the objective of outwitting the opponent team and identifying / hiding the identity of Merlin. First, the mechanisms of hidden identities and the quest procedure combined bring about the dynamics of inference, persuasion, deception, and negotiation. Except for the special roles that have limited knowledge of other players’ identities, the majority of players don’t have a clue who else they are siding with. But as the game progresses, people start to make inferences based on the mission team formation and the status of the quests. However, given that evil guys sometimes play the Succeed card to win trust from good guys, the need to account for human psychology adds complexity and fun to the game. The existence of the voting stage promotes communication among players, incentivizes evil guys to use rhetorics and deception to plant false evidence against good guys and get themselves to go on quests, and for everyone to observe and try to get some hints about other players’ identities from how they behave. When I was playing as a servant of Arthur, I initially played by the principle of trusting nobody, since even bad guys could bluff as good guys through playing the Succeed card. But when neither what people say nor how they act could be used as evidence, it becomes very hard for me to deduce. So I was compelled to assume that e.g., player A was not bluffing when she played the Succeed card, which adds the element of chance to the logical deduction and makes the game more engaging.
Second, the well-crafted special roles in Avalon add spice to the complexity and excitement of the game. Merlin, for example, knows the identity of everyone on the Evil side, which is a great advantage for the Good side. But the game balances this power with the rule that the Evil side will win as long as the Assassin correctly guesses who Merlin is. So Merlin has to find a way to notify the good guys about the identities of the bad guys without making the Evil side suspicious of him. In some cases, Merlin chooses not to disclose any information to keep himself safe. In one round of the game, my friend B who played Merlin pretended not to be Merlin so well that everyone else thought he was a Minion. Due to the important status of Merlin, other players on the good side tend to cover for him by pretending to be Merlin. This bluffing dynamic is brought about by the nature of the game being a team competition and one objective of the good side being to hide the identity of Merlin. But whoever does the bluffing for Merlin is never decided beforehand. As observed from the few rounds I played / observed, it is often the case that a player’s voiced prediction / voting happen to align with the outcomes of the quest that they decide on spot to bluff as Merlin. There are also other interesting roles like Percival who sees both Merlin and Mongana but doesn’t know who is who, and Mordred, whose identity is unknown even to Merlin, etc. These character cards enable players to be highly engaged and at the same time, have very different experiences on different roles, thus making the game very replayable.
An additional merit of Avalon is that it does not eliminate players, so everyone gets to participate throughout the game, which I think is lacking in other social deduction games like Mafia. In Mafia, the players who are voted out in the first or second round would get really bad game experience being excluded from participating in the remainder of the game. However, whoever is deemed suspicious is never voted out and still has the opportunity to defend themselves in the next round of quest. Every single player, not just those with special abilities, but even commoners can have a very engaging experience as they can bluff as important characters like Merlin.
The complexity of the game, however, is a double edged sword. I noticed that when it comes to the discussions for the fourth or fifth quest, most people already forgot who went on previous quests and started to vote with their gut feelings. This to some extent misses the point of a deduction game and is especially salient when people are playing the game in person. Moreover, it is often very challenging for new players to remember all the roles and their special powers, not to mention skillfully leverage them in the discussion. When we were playing, my friend C asserted that D can’t be Merlin “because he’s not among the two people I saw”, partly revealing her identity as Percival. These two factors combined means that this game has a relatively high expectation of its players; in order to have a good game experience, everyone needs to give it their full attention. If there is anyone who is tired of deduction and gets occupied with their phone (and especially if that person has an important role like Merlin), this would ruin the experience for everyone else.
In addition, the discussion can at times take too long. The designer of Avalon put in the mechanic of “if the quest is rejected 5 times in a row, then the Evil side wins” to prevent the good side from continuously rejecting the mission team and the game going on forever. However, a by-product of this mechanic is that it makes players very indecisive before each voting. I think we should consider adding in a timer mechanic to avoid overlong and tiring discussions.
Overall I find Avalon to be a well designed social deduction game that makes use of hidden identities, special characters, quest voting, etc. to bring about the fun of narrative, challenge, and fellowship.
