For this first Critical Play, I tried out Avalon, a social deduction board game designed by Don Eskridge. The game is to be played with a group of 5-10, dividing players into “good” and “evil” factions. Evil players are hidden among the group, and the good faction has the goal of identifying them while successfully completing quests. Officially, the game is intended for ages 13+, but it can be thoroughly enjoyed by anyone with a love for social deduction games or fantasy settings.
I go into every social deduction game with some apprehension as a person on the quieter side. I don’t particularly enjoy jumping into a conversation to make my voice heard, and I try to avoid drawing attention to myself. As a result of this, I tend to avoid taking aggressive or risky actions, especially when I’m a part of the “evil” side in these games.
However, I found that the mechanics of Avalon did a great job of discouraging the passivity that I default to and instead pushing players to make risky moves and engage in heated discussions, which are exactly the fun-generating qualities that strengthen the sense of camaraderie within factions and friendly competition between factions.
The first passivity-reducing mechanic that I identified was the win condition of obtaining a majority of successful or failed quests, for the good and evil faction respectively. Each game consists of just 5 quests, meaning a sense of urgency is created extremely quickly, usually within just two questing rounds. When I played the game, the good faction had succeeded in the first two rounds, needing just one more win to take the whole game. Though we were only about 10 minutes into the game, there was immense pressure on my fellow evildoers and I to take a risky move. My teammate did just this, selecting me for the quest with the hope that we wouldn’t both vote to fail the quest and give ourselves away, but in turn clearing one of us from suspicion.
In other social deduction games like Mafia or Among Us, where there are so many villagers or crewmates to dispatch of that there can be a severe lack of urgency for extremely long periods of time, boredom is commonplace as the heated discussions and risky plays that make the game interesting just don’t happen. Avalon succeeds by creating a quick yet natural progression of urgency and chaos that encourages risk-averse players to step outside their comfort zone and engage more in the group’s social dynamic.
The mechanic of nominating players for quests is another great passivity-reducing mechanic. Being a more passive player, if I am on the evil side in social deduction games I often rely on my teammates to do the evildoing, be it killing villagers or failing quests. However, in Avalon, at any moment you can be selected for a quest, where you are now forced to make the succeed-fail decision and engage in deception. Many times, you may be the only evil player selected for a quest, meaning the decision of whether the quest succeeds or fails rests entirely on your judgment. This happened during my own play of the game, where even though I wanted to take a more passive role as I learned the rules, I was the only evil player selected for a tie-breaking quest. This immediately pinned a substantial amount of suspicion on myself and forced me to argue for my innocence, something I was uncomfortable with doing at first but ultimately made the experience more enjoyable.
Similarly, this also means at any point in the game, a good player can become a prime suspect if they are selected for a quest and it fails. It ensures that no player can just cruise through the rounds without saying anything; everyone will have to defend themselves vehemently at some point. Take Ryan for example, whose strategy for proclaiming his innocence is stating that he is a “beacon of light” repeatedly. This kind of drama is only possible when players feel the room turned against them, and Avalon does a great job of ensuring that every player will have the room turned against them at some point.
From the points discussed thus far, Avalon is clearly a game that heavily encourages players to engage with its deception mechanics, but lying never feels like an immoral action. I feel this is the case for most social deduction games.
Lying feels wrong in day-to-day interactions because it betrays a sense of personal trust between individuals. The key word here is PERSONAL. All social deduction games have some form of narrative or roleplay element that detaches the deception happening in the game from real life. In these games, I’m not personally lying to you, but rather the character that I’m playing as is lying to the character you’re playing as. This acts as a barrier that allows players to not directly associate lies to the people telling them, and not treat lies told to them as personal attacks.
