The Resistance Session Report

The game I played in class and will write my session report on was The Resistance (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41114/resistance). The game was played with Nelson Nguyen, Ricky Reyes, Alex Mai, Hoagie Do, Austin Anderson, Fion Leong, and Madhuri Jujare

Round 2 of the first game

Mechanics: The mechanics listed by BoardGameGeek are partnership, simultaneous action, and voting. I would personally also consider it player elimination, as even though no players leave the game, if a player is confirmed as a spy, they've basically been eliminated from the game.

Game 1: After playing a practice game to familiarize ourselves with the rules, we started the first game. The spies were Alex, Hoagie, and myself. The first round, a spy was chosen to go on the mission, but played a pass card to relieve themselves of suspicion. The second round, another spy was placed on the team, and played a fail, but the resistance became suspicious of another resistance member. The third round passed without a spy on the team. The fourth round, which requires at least 2 fails, got it's original team proposal rejected, but thankfully passed the second time with 2 spies on the team, who managed to fail the mission, but the two spies got suspicion placed on them. In the final round, the last spy, who no one had suspicions of (or at least not enough people did), managed to get onto the team and failed the mission, achieving victory for the spies.

Game 2: In the second game, Alex and myself were once again on the spies team, but this time our ally was Nelson. This time, the first round passed without any spies, but the second round ended in a failure. Suspicion quickly fell on the correct person, and all other rounds managed to succeed (round 4 had one fail, but required two to fail)

Summary: The Resistance's rules were easy to learn and were quickly grasped after only one practice game. We were able to play one practice game and 2 real games within the class time, with about 15 minutes remaining in class, which means the games took an average of ~17 minutes. I only ever played as a spy, so I can't comment on playing as the resistance, but most of the fun of the game came from managing to convince the other players that you were innocent, and laughing as you played a fail card. I imagine the Resistance players would be more stressed during team picking, since they don't know who to trust.