Game Designer The Resistance Avalon

Critical Play 1: Avalon

I chose to play The Resistance: Avalon, designed by Don Eskridge. I played it online due to the coronavirus lockdown.

Avalon is a board game that extends the core of Mafia (e.g., there are good and e vil players, whose true alignments are hidden). It adds some interesting complexity to the mix, which requires players to use a bit more deductive reasoning when making decisions. Because of the use of the teams mechanic, whereby each player must choose other players based on their percieved alignments, and then all the players must vote on whether to approve or reject the team, Avalon features a great deal of logical deduction around players' knowledge and status. There's also diversity among the players beyond their alignments — some are more knowledgeable and important than others, based on which roles they draw at the beginning. Since players can chat, there is also the opportunity for bluffing or misleading other players.

Because of its complexity (especially in its full board-game form), I got the sense that Avalon was intended for board-game veterans who were looking for more advanced versions of Mafia or Assassin. It took me at least three or four games before I knew what was going on most of the time. In a game whose objective is to outwit one's opponents, a steep learning curve can prove fatal. Luckily, once I got over a bit of the learning curve, the joy of figuring out which opponents were good and which were evil, based on their previous plays and behavior in chat, served as excellent motivation for me to continue. Consequently, I think Avalon's level and quality of player interaction makes it successful in delivering a satisfying intellectual challenge without feeling too rigid. The use of bluffing for multiple different gameplay elements (e.g., voting, chatting, picking other players for your team) makes it feel more dynamic than, say, poker or Liar's Dice (in which players only bluff in one way). Personally, I found myself continuing to play for about an hour while procrastinating on this particular writeup.

One satisfying mechanic is the evil team's saving throw, in which they can guess who an omniscient good character (Merlin) is, and upset the game in their favor at the very end. I was playing a non-omniscient good character, but I managed to convince the evil team that I was Merlin, and thereby ensured a good victory in the game. Then, when I was playing as an evil character, I really liked trying to figure out who Merlin was based on their voting and team composition history. I had quite a few failures, mostly related to having a poor understanding of the game rules and mechanics at the beginning.

One change I would make to the online version of the game is to show more behavioral history in the online interface, to make it easier for players to remember the subtleties of what had happened. I got the sense that a lot of the game, at least for more advanced players than I, ended up being about how well you could remember minutia, which took away from some of the fun of deducing who people were.