The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

The Resistance is shockingly simple, but a lot of fun. It’s basically Mafia, but it’s designed so that nobody ever “dies” and is removed from the game in order to keep everyone involved, which I can certainly see as a benefit. It has a bunch of cards, but they’re mostly just for bookkeeping and voting in secret: it’s an entirely social game. I really want to play it some more.

Basically, instead of voting on who to kill, and hoping to kill a bad guy, you’re instead voting on who the “mission team” will be for a top secret mission. Anyone on the mission can turn in a “Mission Fail” vote to screw the mission over, so if you put the bad guys on the mission, they will ruin it. If the good guys make 3 of the 5 missions happen, they win. If the bad guys manage to make 3 of the 5 missions fail, they win. For every mission, a different random “Mission Team Leader” is selected. This person is the only one who can call for votes. However, everyone is free to vote and complain and things of that nature. A majority has to approve a team for the mission to begin, but if 5 votes are called and fail, the mission is scrapped, which helps out the bad guys.

By looking at the mission results, you try to determine trustworthiness of everyone involved, just like in Mafia. It’s awesome. There aren’t really powered players, perse, although they have a mechanic where players can get one shot powers. When a new leader is picked, that person will draw a number of plot cards based on the number of players. They then, without looking at them, must distribute them to whoever they see fit who is not themselves. These give one-shot powers, like being able to take over as team leader, or looking at another player’s affiliation card, or even forcing someone to vote in public instead of in secret. However, there’s never many of them in play, so it doesn’t take away from the core gameplay. They’re just little twists.

The one game we played so far was kind of fucked, though. Spaeth, who was a good guy, sabotaged the first mission for NO FUCKING REASON, which made the bad guys, Shauna and Essner, win easily. I think he didn’t understand how huge of a setback that was and just thought he’d do something funny, then play for real after. It kind of sucked, though. Next time I’m sure he wouldn’t be like that. I do want to play it again.

Yeah, it’s a nice little Mafia variant party game! And I do like my Mafia.