The Resistance is a short, deception based game that makes for a good ice breaker and is fun in groups, especially those that are well established and where everyone knows each other! Who doesn’t want to try and defeat a traitor?
In The Resistance, everyone starts with a hidden role card, letting them know if they are good or a spy. Spies want to ensure that missions fail, while the good people want to, obviously, pass the missions. Then, once roles are assigned, one person is selected as a leader.
This leader does not change unless the rest of the group (or the majority) decide to overthrow their decisions, which is something to keep in mind when it comes to choosing your first leader, as it can be a really important decision. Everyone also gets an Approve and Reject card, to vote on the mission, and a Failure and Success card, which is used during the mission. It’s pretty straight forward really.
Players will then work through the board, which has a handful of missions on them, with the required amount of people that need to be taken. The leader will decide who is going on the mission, giving each of them a Gun token, then everyone else will vote on if they approve the mission. If the mission goes ahead, everyone picks out their failure or success card and puts them into a pile. Then, they are shuffled and revealed. If one person puts in a failure card, then the whole mission fails, and it is marked accordingly on the board.
When you have missions with just two people, it’s easy to force a spy’s hand at making a mission a success, as they don’t want to be singled out, but many of the missions are quite big, so you quickly need to start deciding who to exclude. Then, when it comes to the approval of the mission process, you will need to convince your friends that the person you are excluding is a spy. And if you are wrong, you are likely to be removed from power the next time, because chances are you could be the spy.
The Resistance, though very short, is easy to set up and very fun to play. It’s one of those games where you really don’t trust everyone, and while being the leader is the safest place to be, nobody will let you be the leader for long!
You can pick up a copy of The Resistance from Amazon.
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