The Resistance: Avalon is a King Arthur themed bluffing game.
Title: The Resistance: Avalon
Year Published: 2012
Designer: Don Eskridge
Publisher: Indie Boards and Cards
Players: 5-10
Game Time: 30+ Mins
Set-up Time: >5 Mins
Ages: 12+
Theme: King Arthur
Mechanic: Bluffing, Voting, Deduction
How to win: Complete, or Fail 3 quests.
Game Description
The Resistance: Avalon pits the forces of Good and Evil in a battle to control the future of civilization. Arthur represents the future of Britain, a promise of prosperity and honour, yet hidden among his brave warriors are Mordred’s unscrupulous minions. These forces of evil are few in number but have knowledge of each other and remain hidden from all but one of Arthur’s servants. Merlin alone knows the agents of evil, but he must speak of this only in riddles. If his true identity is discovered, all will be lost.
Set-Up
Place a tableau that shows the correct number of players in the middle of the table. Put a counter on position 1 of the voting track and in the space on quest 1.
Give each player 2 vote tokens and shuffle the characters and deal 1 out to each player. The number of Evil/Good characters needed for the game is shown on the player board.
A random player takes the leader token.
The Resistance: Avalon Game Play
For this section, I am going to go through gameplay for a 5 player game with no special roles. This gives you an idea how the game is played and allows me to go through each special role and variant rules in the round-up without too much messing about 🙂
Also keep in mind that this game is all about bluffing and deduction so at each stage in this process everyone will be talking to each other, making accusations, lying about being evil etc
So for a 5 player game, there will be 3 Loyal Servants of Arthur and 2 Minions of Mordred. These are dealt face down to each player and each player gets to look at their own role.
Someone will call out roles. In this example game, there will be very little to say but firstly everyone closes their eyes.
The Minions of Mordred open their eyes so they know who each other is. Then everyone closes their eyes and then everyone opens their eyes at the same time.
Team Building Phase
Then the leader needs to pick a team. The first quest in a 5 player game needs 2 people so the leader will pass a token to the two people they have chosen. The leader can pick themselves.
All players except the leader will simultaneously use their vote tokens to vote ‘Approve’ if they think this is a good team of ‘Reject’ if they don’t. A majority vote is required for the Quest to go ahead.
If it is a tie, or the team is rejected the voting track is moved on and the Leader token is passed to the left.
The ‘Team Build’ phase then starts again with the new leader. If the vote is rejected 5 times in a row then the Good has been delayed too long and the game ends in a victory for the Evil team.
If the vote is successful then the Quest Phase begins.
Quest Phase
Each player who was selected to go on the Quest is given a pair of Quest cards that say ‘Pass’ on one and ‘Fail’ on the other.
The Good players MUST select Pass.
The Evil players can select either Pass or Fail.
The card the players select is passed to the leader who shuffles them and reveals them. If there is one Fail in the pile, the Quest fails.
If there is one Fail card, Evil win this one, if not it’s a victory for Good. Either way, you move on to the next Quest.
The Resistance: Avalon Game End
When one side wins a majority of the Quests (3 out of the 5) the game ends and that team wins.
Should the Good team win there is a way for the evil team to win one more time if the Assassin is in play. I will talk about that later.
Round-Up
This is my favourite social deduction game. It took me a LONG time to get the hang of it but now I know what I’m doing, what to look for etc I like it even more.
It can get rowdy with larger player numbers, it can be frustrating when no one will listen to you but then again why should they believe you? 🙂
While the base game is good, it’s the extra roles that make the game. Here are the extras roles and what they do, in order of how much I like them.
Merlin & Assassin
Merlin knows who the evil players are. During set-up, after the Minions of Mordred look at each other, they close their eyes, put their thumbs up and Merlin gets to see who the evil guys are. This gives the good guys an advantage.
To balance this, the Assassin just plays like a normal Minion of Mordred through the entire game. I mentioned earlier the evil guys can win after the game has finished if the good guys win, well this is how. The Assassin picks a player from the victorious good team before everyone reveals their roles. If the Assassin picks Merlin, the Evil guys steal the win.
This balances the advantage Merlin gives, it also stops Merlin from being too obvious. I would never play the game without these roles.
Percival
Percival knows who Merlin is. During set-up, Merlin will put out a thumb so Percival can see him. Remember, Merlin won’t know who Percival is.
Percival needs to follow Merlin to ‘agree’ with him to help out vote the Evil guys each round.
He also needs to act like Merlin to pull the Assassin’s attention away from the real Merlin, just in case.
Morgana
Morgana appears as Merlin. So Percival will see two thumbs, one Merlin, one Morgana and Percival’s job is to work out which is which, fast!
Oberon
This guy is unknown to Evil, and won’t know who the Evil players are at the start of the game. Better for larger player numbers when the Evil team seem to be winning a lot. When the Evil players open their eyes, Oberon keeps them closed.
Mordred
Mordred does not reveal himself to Merlin but does reveal himself to his fellow evil players. Helps the bad guys quite a bit.
There are a few other things like Lancelot, Excalibur and Lady of the Lake but I haven’t played with them enough/at all.
The Resistance: Avalon Rating
One of my favourites.
I give it 8/10
This game is a member of my Board Game Hall of Fame!
It’s also a Social Deduction Game so check out my tips for that kind of game.
The Resistance: Avalon Ups & Downs
These are my Ups & Downs for The Resistance: Avalon. Check out where the games finished in my board game league table.
The Resistance: Avalon Initial Review
I’ve never played a bluffing game before so I didn’t know what I was going to make of this game.
But now I’m kind of glad this game works best with 7 players as I don’t think I’ll want to play any other game.
It is complex and there’s a lot of thought needed. You need to remember who voted ‘Successful’ and ‘Unsuccessful’ to get an idea of who wanted a mission to pass or fail.
Merlin may say ‘Unsuccessful’ if at least one ‘Evil’ is selected. (As they will obviously select ‘Fail’). He may want to vote ‘successful’ for a group with a bad guy in to divert suspicion.
Oberon will say ‘Unsuccessful’ if all 4 ‘Good’ are selected. (As they will obviously all ‘Pass’)
The game is tense and well designed and here’s why…
If ‘Evil’ give themselves away, the 4 good guys can put themselves on the mission, vote ‘successful’ (4 vs 3), go on the mission, all vote ‘Pass’ and win the game.
If Merlin reveals himself, or another ‘Good’ team member reveals Merlin, the Assassin can kill him at the end of the game to win.
All in all, a great game. Player count sucks (5+, 7 or 9 is perfect) but it wouldn’t really work as well with less. I really can’t wait to play this again.
The Resistance First Impressions June 2016
The Resistance is the game The Resistance: Avalon is based on. It has a different theme but gameplay is essentially the same.
We only had 5 players so we played a quick game of the regular version. This is the same game but without roles, which we probably wouldn’t use in a five-player game anyway.
The art is good and the pics are nice I just really prefer The Resistance: Avalon theme…
I won as the bad guys though so It’s all good 😀
Jesta ThaRogue