I chose to do an analysis over Avalon for this comparison, which is a hidden role social deduction game published by Indie Boards & Cards, based on Don Eskridge’s The Resistance system. The game is built for 5 to 10 players and is themed around King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Avalon is often sold as a party game, but the amount of hidden information and the multi round structure give it more depth than a typical casual party game. I want to compare Avalon to our team’s game, Aliens, which shares the same foundation of hidden identity and group discussion but modifies almost every other formal element to create a longer, more unstable experience where no player’s trust in anyone else is ever fully secure.
Avalon splits players into a good team, the loyal servants of Arthur, and an evil team, the minions of Mordred, without revealing who belongs to which side. A few players get special information. Merlin secretly knows who all the evil players are and has to use that knowledge to guide the good team without being so obvious that the evil team can identify him. Percival knows who Merlin and Morgana are but not which one is which, which keeps even the good team a little uncertain of itself. Each round, a rotating leader proposes a team to go on a mission, and the whole group votes to approve or reject that proposed team. If a team is approved, the players on that mission secretly submit a success or fail card, and only the total count of fails is revealed, never who submitted what. Good wins by completing three missions. Evil wins by failing three missions, or, even if good wins all three missions, evil can still win at the very end if their assassin correctly guesses which player is Merlin.
What stood out most to me playing Avalon is how much tension the assassin’s final guess adds to the entire game. Nothing ever feels fully decided, since even a clean sweep of successful missions can be reversed in the last few seconds. This creates an aesthetic of sustained suspicion that lasts the whole game, since the assassin has effectively been quietly studying everyone’s behavior the entire time while pretending to just go along with the group. I also noticed that Avalon’s heavy Arthurian theming works against it a little. Names like Percival, Morgana, and Mordred do not tell you anything about what the role actually does, so new players kept mixing up their own abilities early on. This is a useful contrast for our own game, since Alien’s role names, Alien, Researcher, Human, map directly onto their function the same way a game like Mafia does, which gives players an immediate sense of what they can and cannot do.
Aliens shares Avalon’s foundation of hidden roles, asymmetric information, and group based decision making. Just as Percival and Merlin know things that ordinary good players do not, our Researcher can learn whether a specific player is currently Alien or Human, and that information becomes public, shaping how the rest of the group interprets everyone’s later behavior. Both games also scale their team sizes directly with player count. Avalon adjusts the number of good and evil players and mission sizes based on the total group, and Aliens does the same with its Human to Alien ratio.
Where Aliens really diverges is in how unstable identity becomes over time. In Avalon, your team is fixed for the entire game. In Alien, the Alien can infect a new player each night, and that player becomes a real Alien starting the next round, with no way for the rest of the group to know it happened. This means trust in Aliens has an expiration date that nobody can see coming, which produces a very different aesthetic from Avalon’s single dramatic reveal. Instead of one big twist at the end, our game creates a slow, creeping erosion of trust across many rounds. Aliens also introduces a resource layer that Avalon does not have at all. Every player earns tokens each day and can spend them on cards like Blood Test, Strangle, or Repair, while Aliens can spend tokens to sabotage the greenhouse or the airlock. This turns some of the social deduction into an economic decision as well, since players have to weigh whether to spend limited tokens now or save them for later. On top of that, our game adds a random event roll at the start of each day that can double everyone’s tokens or take one away, introducing a layer of variance that Avalon’s purely vote and card based structure avoids entirely.
One smaller parallel I noticed is that the app version of Avalon I played effectively acts as an automated moderator, privately telling each player their role and handling the bookkeeping around votes and mission results. Aliens builds this same function directly into the design with a dedicated human Moderator who never plays, which is necessary in our case since so much private information, who is infected, who was researched, needs to be tracked and revealed at the right times by someone who is not competing to win.
