The spy who loved me: The Resistance review

The Resistance & The Resistance: Avalon
Designed by: Don Eskridge
Publisher: Indie Boards & Cards
Players: 5-10

If you've ever played a party deduction game like Mafia or Werewolf that pits a hidden handful of players against the others, racing to work out who's on your team before it's too late, you've got the basic idea of The Resistance. Now what happens when you take out the unfun bits like player elimination and the need for a sidelined moderator to run the game, and add tidbits of information that make decisions an interesting, agonizing deduction instead of arbitrary guesses? You get teamwork, betrayal, and a whole ton of fun. Welcome to The Resistance.


The Resistance is a party game of hidden roles and bluffing. Players are randomly dealt a card that assigns them a role as either one of the noble members of an underground resistance striking back against the evil empire, or a sneaky good-for-nothing imperial spy who's infiltrated the team to subvert it. The spies know who's on their team, but the resistance members are left in the dark, and it's up to them to ferret out the conspirators among them before they tank vital resistance missions. There are actually two versions of this game, the basic resistance plays almost identically to it's followup release Avalon, and either version can be tweaked to play like the other, so I'll cover the areas they have in common first and then go into Avalon a bit and what sets it apart.

Role cards for resistance members and spies

The Resistance is easy to teach and quick to play, once you've dealt out the role cards and explained blue good guys vs red bad guys, the game has already begun and the seeds of doubt and suspicion are sown. To begin play, everyone closes their eyes. The spies open their eyes to acknowledge each other, typically with a conspiratorial nod and smile, then close their eyes again. Everyone opens their eyes and begins the game with their best expressions of wounded innocence at the ready.

Mission board and vote track - 5 consecutive failed votes is a win for the spies!

The gameplay in The Resistance is based around building teams of players to go on missions. The mission board is a best-of-five track, with each space showing the number of players who need to be on the team for that mission (this varies depending on player count). The person in the role of team leader nominates that many players to form a team, and everyone votes to either accept or reject the team. If the team fails to get the approval of half the players, the team leader position passes to the next person in line, and they get a turn at trying to build a team that meets with the approval of the majority. Once the players put together a team that gets voted up, each person on the mission gets a pair of cards denoting 'Success' or 'Failure', one of which is played secretly to a face down pile on the table. Good guys can only ever play success, but spies can play a success OR a fail. One fail card is enough to sink the mission, and irrevocably taint that team in the eyes of the other players with the damning certainty of a spy in the ranks. Perhaps there were only two of you on the mission and you know you're not a spy, but can you convince everyone else when the other guy is insisting just as forcefully that it's you who is the traitor? You better hope so.

That sinking feeling when you flip the third card and see FAIL

These failed missions along with the voting patterns of the players give you the information to make your decisions for future missions. That group of 3 guys from the last failed mission contains at least one spy, but can you even form the next team without ANY of them, when two of them went on a previously successful mission? What if you think you've worked out which of them is a spy - but in fact they're all spies, throwing a teammate under the bus to gain the trust of the loyal resistance members? Can you even afford to see this team rejected when the team leadership and the fate of the resistance could very well be about to rotate into the hands of a spy? And what if you're that spy on a mission with one or more other spies, who's going to play the fail card? Because two or more fails showing up is going to see your team cut out of the future missions no matter how you protest your innocence. It's these tense social calculations that provide the meat of The Resistance, and the extremely simple rules just exist to facilitate the accusations and betrayals. Like poker this is a game where you're not playing the mechanics, you're playing the other players.

Avalon switches up the theme from dystopian sci-fi to Arthurian fantasy, but the gameplay remains almost identical. In fact you can leave out the additional roles and play it as a carbon copy of the original Resistance, but the extra layers added by Avalon take a good game and make it something really special. Avalon adds a bit of complexity in that now people are not just good guys or spies, but may have a special role with an additional ability. The key role that will be included in most every game is Merlin, who gains the ability to know who among the players are spies - during the beginning of game closed-eye portion, the spies will raise their thumbs while Merlin opens his eyes so he can see the evil players but not be seen. However, this doesn't break the game because of the counterpoint role on the evil team - The Assassin. At the end of the game, the evil team confers with one another as to who they think was Merlin, with the player drawing the Assassin card making the final call. If they successfully identify Merlin, the spies win regardless of the mission outcomes. This means Merlin needs to try and subtly steer the voting and nominations towards teams favourable to the resistance, while the spies watch vigilantly to try and pick who knows just a little too much. This bluff and counter-bluff adds a brilliant level of additional deduction to the basic game that can be enhanced and expanded with the other roles.

To briefly address the extra role cards, the recommendation is for Merlin/Assassin to form the basic composition, then add roles to balance out problems of one team winning disproportionately which is a problem that often arises in the same group playing repeatedly, and goes largely unaddressed in base Resistance. Percival is permitted to know who Merlin is (not the other way around) in order to try and take the heat off Merlin and keep him safe from assassination by acting Merlin-like. Paired with him is Morgana, who is a spy that appears as Merlin to Percival during the reveal, forcing Percival to work out who is the spy and who is the real Merlin he should be protecting. There is also Oberon, the standalone spy who doesn't know the other spies and who isn't known to them (makes the game easier for team good) and Mordred, who is invisible to Merlin (makes the game easier for the bad guys). These roles take the place of a generic spy/servant of arthur so that the player counts are maintained.

So given the extras offered by Avalon's roles and the ability to play the game as per basic Resistance anyway is there any reason to pick The Resistance over Avalon? Not really. They're the same price (cheap!), and component-wise are almost identical, Avalon is just more game for your buck. Perhaps you're dead set on the sci-fi theme over the King Arthur reskin, but to be honest that theme is paper thin anyway, "The Resistance" and "The Empire" are pretty much undefined placeholders for "good" and "bad", and the success/fail mechanics for missions don't really convey anything that feels mission-like. If you must have it though, you can simply nominate specific portraits on the role cards to count as the equivalent roles from Avalon, for example using the white haired resistance member as Merlin.

The once and future Merlin

All in all either version of The Resistance deserves a spot on anybody's shelf. The engaging dynamic social puzzles will keep you interested countless plays down the line, and the bare bones simplicity of the rules and 30 minute play time make it perfect as a filler between other games, or as a great party game experience in it's own right that you can introduce to just about any group, gamers or no. Just don't play with people who are going to get touchy when accused of being spies because no matter what, a game of Resistance is going to be full of suspicion and lies upon lies upon lies. But in a good way. Buy The Resistance, because only a filthy treacherous spy wouldn't, and you're not a spy.. are you?

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