Summer is the WORST weather for spies thanks to all that dark-coloured clothing, although they do get to skulk in cooling shadows and hang out on one-man submersibles I guess so perhaps I’ve overstated the issue. Future spies definitely have a bad time of it though, with global warming having gone crackers and the authoritarian world government inevitably pushing their hours up at the same time as cutting holidays and taking away the free teabags.
You can avoid all that nonsense by grabbing yourself a copy of The Resistance, which I’ve already gushed over in these pages as a hilarious hidden-roles game that basically lets you find out which of your so-called friends is most likely to suddenly push you down the stairs or steal your cat and run off into the night. There is shouting too. And rage. SO MUCH RAGE. I love The Resistance for the way it encourages people to act in ways they normally never would, casually lying to your face before subtly incriminating someone else as the secret saboteur and sitting back to enjoy the mayhem. But despite its brilliance and opportunity for individual expression, games can become, well, a bit formulaic after a while to be honest, especially when you get to know each other’s playing styles and tell-tale signs they’re lying.
Publisher Indie Boards and Cards made some effort to mix things up by including a set of ‘plot’ cards in the game, which give players special powers they can use to help ferret out spies or throw a spanner in the works of missions. But that’s nothing compared to the chaos injected through the 2012 follow-up The Resistance: Avalon, an Arthurian re-skin of the core game which added super-powered characters to individual cards. No longer are you just a resistance member or government spy. Now players could be Merlin, or Morgana, or Mordred, or any medieval character beginning with M, each with their own intrinsic ability which tears up the strategy book for the base game and fires it into the sun. Merlin, for example, is a ‘good guy’ who KNOWS WHO THE SPIES ARE, giving the resistance team a huge advantage in picking the right people to go on missions and win the game.
Merlin needs to be far more subtle than just blurting out his or her information, however, as the spy team includes a character called The Assassin, who wins the game for the bad guys if they work out who Merlin is at the end – EVEN IF THE RESISTANCE HAS ALREADY WON. Help!
Other cards throw further mindbenders into the game – Percival knows who Merlin is at the start and can help cover his or her tracks to throw off The Assassin. Include Morgana, however, and she also reveals herself secretly to Percival as Merlin at the beginning, leaving him with no idea who to trust. A player cast as Oberon, another evil-doer, doesn’t have to reveal themselves to Merlin at all, and so on and so on until everyone’s winking at each other pretending to be Merlin and no one knows what the hell is going on anymore.
It’s brilliant – a much-needed injection of bedlam after the base game has begun to get a little dry, and the good news is there’s more on the way. Indie Boards and Cards are currently Kickstarting two expansions for the vanilla version of The Resistance, which adds in Avalon’s bells and whistles as well as a string of other enhancements which sound like they will leave your poor brain in tatters. Defectors, who can switch allegiance mid-game, Reversers, who can change the result of any mission, Inquisitors, who can find out who other players really are – the list goes on, and each one I look at leaves me drooling at the chance to bring them into our games. Getting in early by backing the Kickstarter also means you’ll get two extra ‘modules’ not included in the retail version of the games, including the amazing-sounding Rogue Agents, who have their own individual victory conditions and attempt to win selfish solo victories without caring a jot about the rest of their team. This guy’s probably one of them – either that or a terribly lost hipster. Look at that jacket!
The Kickstarter ends on August 9 and is priced at a cool $28 including shipping if you’re based in the UK – that’s £16.44 in real money. That cash nets you both expansions plus the sexy bonus content, although Indie Boards and Cards reckon the game won’t be with us until we feel November’s icy claw.
The Boarding Kennel 