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« Last post by Dragon on July 10, 2022, 16:18:16 »
For those unfamiliar with The Resistance, it is a social deduction game for a large number of players, from 5 to 10 people. If you've ever played the classic Werewolf or Mafia party game, you should have an idea of how role-playing can fit into game of deduction. Everyone gets a secret identity at the beginning of the game to determine which team they are on. Similar to Werewolf, the smaller team will find out who they are working with, but the larger team needs to figure out who everyone is. Unlike Werewolf, a moderator isn't needed to run the game the whole time since there is only one point at the beginning when everyone needs to close their eyes and give the chance for the Spies (Red Team) to see who they are working with. After that, cards are played in secret, which helps to keep identities hidden.
The Resistance (Blue Team) is tasked with doing a series of missions with each person on the mission having a chance to disrupt the plan and cause the mission to fail. The Resistance always want the mission to be successful - they win by having 3 successful missions, but the Spies want to cause the missions to fail - they win by having 3 failed missions. There's not a random chance of failing or succeeding the mission, it's based on what each player selected for the mission decided on their own, but a single point of failure (in most cases) will cause the entire mission to fail. Each round, there is a new captain for the mission, and the captain must choose who will go on the mission based on the required number for the mission. If the captain is on the Blue Team (The Resistance), that player will usually want everyone on the mission to also be from the Blue Team, but if the captain is on the Red Team (Spies), they usually aren't going to want the mission to go without a Spy in the group because that will mean that they don't have a chance to sabotage the mission. Once the captain decides who to send, everyone around the table must vote on whether or not the captains proposal goes through, with a majority vote winning. The way that the mission results go, the captains selections, and even the voting to accept the proposals are all indicators about who is on which team.
On July 4th this year, we had the pleasure of seeing our niece and her baby girl and this was one of the games that we played with the group. We played 3 times with 6 players, Autumn, Tim, Lena, Isaac, Beth, and myself, with Grace playing the 3rd game on Beth's team.
We played through the 1st game with me and Tim as Spies. I had secretly dealt the cards, but really gave a huge clue in my turn that I was on the Spy team because we were just going to play a "practice round" so I played a Fail card in a mission where it was just me and Autumn. There were so many questions still that I just decided to keep going and since the games are pretty short anyway, I figured I could get them all to play again afterward. The Resistance won.
Game #2, I believe Tim and Autumn were dealt the Spy cards. The rest of us were easily able to determine that the two of them were Spies, so The Resistance won that game also.
After the second game, Tim proposed a variation rule because he noticed that we were getting clues about who was a spy based on the pre-mission votes and with only 6-players in the game, it was pretty easy to see. His proposal was to play all voting tiles in secret, the same way we play the mission cards because it was so hard to win as a Spy. We agreed to try this variation out, although I think with more players and/or more experience, this variation may not be necessary to balance out the win ratio. We talked about changing up some other things, using other variations or a different number of players, but Tim just said he wanted to keep the changes minimal, so we went with that. Sort of... Beth offered to have Grace play, and she accepted, but since she hadn't played the game at first and wasn't paying attention, it was a matter of teaching her while we were going... which was kind of frustrating all around especially since we were trying to go with the momentum we had. Beth suggested just playing along side Grace, but at various points she picked up cards and things got a bit mixed up.
Game #3, I'm pretty sure that Tim and Autumn again were dealt the Spy cards. I know Tim was for sure because later in the game Isaac commented about how unlikely it was that Tim was a Spy all 3 times, but he actually was. In the 3rd game, it was very close. In Mission #4, we had some trouble getting everyone to agree on who to send for the mission. The captain's proposal had been refused multiple times and it had gotten around to me. I tried to talk the group through some things before making my proposal because I felt like someone on The Resistance side was voting with the Spies because of something that we didn't understand, because we kept having 3 votes to Approve and 3 votes to Reject, which went in favor of Reject for a tie. It was finally at a point that if we didn't get a mission to be accepted, I felt like it was going to be in control of the Spies and we were just going to have a failed mission because of it being rejected too many times. (Unfortunately, at this point the tiles got mixed up, between the hidden voting and the Beth/Grace combo, but I decided to take what I had, trying not to slow down the game that had already run longer than usual - we got 3 Reject and 3 Approve votes even though after the game everyone on The Resistance team said they had voted to Approve the mission at that point.) After being Rejected again, Autumn was captain and even though it didn't look good, the rest of us sent the group out on the mission knowing that Spies were in it. The Spies won in the end.
For anyone interested in trying this Variant that we played, I do think it was a good option for the 6-player game, but maybe have everyone hold onto their "discard" until all the "result" cards/tiles have been collected - Players all turn voting tiles in secretly, so that voting is anonymous the same way the mission cards are played.
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