The Resistance: Avalon (Avalon) is a unilateral competition game designed by Don Eskridge. It is an appealing social deduction game for 5-10 players, preferably ages 13+, with both online and card (for example, published by Indie Boards & Cards) versions. I played the card version during our first game night.
Central argument
The game emphasizes social deduction through its combination of fellowship and competition focusing on outwit with limitations on information and dynamics in rules and roles. The players were separated into two competing groups, the minions of Mordred hoping to fail the majority of the quests, and the loyal servant of Anchor aiming to pass the majority of the quests and hide Merlin. During the game, fellowship appears when minions are helping each other get into the Quest for the Mordred team and avoiding minions getting into the Quest for the Anchor. This makes up the clear and excellent outwit objectives given the rules and roles.
The flexible rules bring extra dynamics to the game and create multiple approaches to enjoy. The game itself does not restrict the process of play a lot (e.g. players could decide on what to speak each round, whether to accept quest team or move to the next term, etc.) but players face tradeoffs for each of their moves or decisions. For example, there are tradeoffs between whether to fail the Quest or hide the identities for the Mordred team by voting success, and Merlin can choose to create a team without minions to succeed in the quest but face the chances of being recognized by the Mordred team. Such flexibility is also based on limited information access. There is no way for the players to receive ground truth of the correctness of other players’ words in this game so players have much freedom to deceive. For example, minions could pretend to be on the Anchor team by voting success to quests and Percival could play aggressively to pretend that he/she is the Merlin. Challenges were brought in through this way by thinking about what to pretend and how to let others believe who you are and are not. Such limitation on information also brings in extra challenges in how to explore, guess, and validate each others’ identity and vary based on the roles that players received so players could have different joys in different rounds receiving different limitations.
Analysis
Overall, I really enjoy this game due to the fact that everyone can interact and be involved in every round, which is usually not the case for many social deduction games where players could be voted out or killed in each round and can not do anything later. Similar to other social deduction games, when there are more players, more different roles can be involved, which brings in extra game dynamics and information barriers that increase the challenges. For example, we first played the game with 6 players where Merlin knows all the minions, while this is not true when we invite another player to also include Mordred who is hidden from Merlin. This brings in more challenges for Merlin to decide who to involve in the quests.
The learned bias of this game might affect how players like it or not and might become a flaw of this game. On the good side, the more familiar the players are with the game, the more approaches to play could be discovered. For example, during our first round of play, all of us intended to tell the truth, and the minions intended to hide their identities instead of playing aggressively by voting failure to the quests, and we started to have more strategies to decide whether to hide v.s. fail the quests in later rounds of play. On the other side, we also spend much time understanding each role and matching them with the name of the roles at first given that the names of the roles might bring in confusion and mismatching especially when we try adding new optional roles, which might make the new players bored and confused if they do not have enough time. I think this might be related to that the instructions of this paper-version card game did not include a clear statements of what each roles should do clearly at first so we spent some time digging through the instructions to find out what we exactly want to do with this game based on the role cards. Maybe having a verison of cleaner and clearer instructions might help with this.
I think this game might also be impacted by whether you are familiar with the people you are playing with, which might be a learned bias that breaks the boundaries of the game as flaws. The more familiar you get with other players, it’s more likely that you can guess their identity correctly based on their movements and words when you understand what each player intends to do, such as why they lie, through many rounds of play. Such information is supposed to be outside of the boundaries where people’s decisions should be only impacted by what other players do and say within the game so that the challenges and joys from deceiving and guessing might disappear. Maybe this could be resolved with digital versions where players could be paired with different people to avoid information from outside the game boundaries.
At the same time, the game might take a long time for each round, which might make the player bored or tired, especially when playing the roles with little information access. During our play, I received the servant role all the time and became tired at the end. I hoped to take some notes to try filtering out false information by recording what happened in each round, testing my hypothesis, and guessing who was against each other, but I did not bring paper and pen. I lost energy quickly when trying to remember every detail and finally got so tired and lost that I found it hard to focus. I think this might be because the normal servants have the least information access so players have no idea about what is happening especially in the beginning where the evil team also tends to hide if involved in the two-play quest and could get lost if no notes are taken. Also, similar to other social deduction games, when there are fewer people, there are fewer different roles, which makes the game lacking dynamics. Maybe there might be some additional mechanisms that have the roles shuffled well to enable all players to enjoy and try different roles, or more restrictions on how many rounds the players could play. The game itself could also suggest the players prepare paper and pen as potential resources.
