Avalon is one of my favorite games. I have played it many times over the years with different groups of friends, usually as a card game at gatherings. For this blog post, I played it again, this time using a mobile app version, and I noticed some things about my own behavior and about the game’s design that I hadn’t paid much attention to before.
On the high level, Avalon is a social deduction game set in a mythical, medieval Britain built around the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Players are secretly split into two teams, good and evil, without knowing who else is on which side. The good side wins by successfully completing three out of five missions. The evil side wins if they fail three missions, or, even if good completes all three missions, evil can still win at the very end if their assassin correctly guesses which player is Merlin. Merlin is a good character who secretly knows the identities of the evil players and is supposed to use that knowledge to guide the good team, but he has to do it carefully, since if he is too obvious the evil team will figure out who he is and win anyway. Percival knows who Merlin and Morgana are, but not which one is which, which adds another layer of uncertainty into every conversation.
I played the Wechat mini-app version of the game that is similar to https://apps.apple.com/us/app/avalon-offline-party-games-irl/id1536756554. Once everyone’s roles were assigned, the app tracked the missions and revealed outcomes for us. Because of this, my experience wasn’t exactly the same as playing with physical cards, since the app handled some of the pacing and bookkeeping that a group would normally manage themselves.
Playing this game again made me notice how much I default to a wait and watch role when I don’t have special information. Most rounds I was just a loyal servant of Arthur with no extra knowledge, so my main job was to pay attention to how people voted, how they reacted when missions failed, and who seemed to be pushing too hard for a certain outcome. I tend to build my read on someone slowly, based on a pattern of behavior across multiple rounds, rather than reacting strongly to any single vote or comment. When I did get a role with more information, like Percival, I noticed I became more careful about what I said, since I didn’t want to accidentally reveal that I knew something I shouldn’t.
The structure of the game brings out clear differences in how people participate. Some players take charge early, push hard for their suspicions, and try to steer the team’s decisions. Others sit back and mostly go along with the group’s momentum. I noticed that the more assertive players often got accused earlier, sometimes correctly and sometimes not, simply because they stood out more. The quieter players could stay under the radar longer, which worked in their favor whether they were good or evil.
One thing I really like about Avalon is that nothing feels decided until the very last moment. Even if the good team wins all three missions, the game isn’t over, since the assassin gets one final chance to end it by identifying Merlin. That single mechanic keeps the whole game from ever feeling settled, and it means the assassin has been quietly studying the entire round even while pretending to just go along with everyone else.
The one drawback I noticed, especially with newer players, is how much the Arthurian theme gets in the way of understanding the game itself. Names like Percival, Morgana, and Mordred don’t tell you anything about what the role actually does, so people who weren’t familiar with the legend kept mixing up their own abilities in the first couple of rounds. This is different from a game like Mafia, where the role names map directly onto what you can do, like a doctor or a detective. In Avalon, the connection between the name and the function has to be memorized rather than inferred, and that lack of affordance caused some real confusion early on and threw off a few of our games before people settled in.
As for the ethics question, Avalon is built entirely around expected deception. Evil players are supposed to lie about their identity, and Merlin is supposed to mislead people about how much he knows, without saying anything false about his own role. I don’t think this kind of lying is unethical, since everyone at the table agreed to a game where deception is the whole point. It’s not that different from an actor playing a villain in a scene. The trust that gets tested is trust within the game, not trust between the actual people playing it, and once the game ends, none of that carries over. Someone can spend a whole round lying convincingly to my face and then immediately go back to being someone I trust completely, and nobody treats that as strange at all.
