We play The Resistance often in Madison. I love it. It’s a great way to practice explicit Bayesian reasoning: “How likely is it that he would do what he just did if he was a spy? If he was a resistance member?” I recommend any group here trying it at least once or twice; it can be fantastic, but depends strongly on people’s attitude towards the game.
Timer variation.
If your games run long, then start a 3-to-5-minute timer at the beginning of each round. Once the timer stops, discussion must stop; the leader must name a team, and players must vote for it, without any further “help” from other players.
Obviously keeping the game short makes it much less time-consuming—our group can play one untimed game in 2 hours, or three timed games. The long game is more intense, but the short games fit better into any given get-together.
More importantly, 40-minute timed games are short enough that resistance members can learn something about the validity of their thought processes. In a longer game, spotting your mistakes after learning people’s true identities is much harder.
Spies, on the other hand, can learn lots of useful technique during a long game, because they know the state of the game, and get strong feedback when suspected or directing suspicion. As such, when we played for a long time without timers, we became much better as spies than as resistance members, and the spies won almost every game. This trend seems to be changing now that we play timed games, but I’ll defer judgment until we’ve played this way at least a dozen more times.
Other variations.
Randomize the order of the rounds, so that they aren’t always shortest first. (This should usually help the resistance, though not always.)
Flip the played cards from each mission one at a time, and stop when you’ve flipped them all, or you’ve flipped enough red cards to sabotage. (This can help the spies.)
Don’t try these until your group has a pretty good idea what’s going on, and you have some reason to suspect that they’d change the stable strategy. I’m not going to describe exactly what these changes are for; that would spoil some of the fun. :)
when we played for a long time without timers, we became much better as spies than as resistance members, and the spies won almost every game.
I think the main reason for this is that without a timer, the spies have every opportunity for motivated continuation, and thus the group never stops on a good team unless every spy has been identified.
We play The Resistance often in Madison. I love it. It’s a great way to practice explicit Bayesian reasoning: “How likely is it that he would do what he just did if he was a spy? If he was a resistance member?” I recommend any group here trying it at least once or twice; it can be fantastic, but depends strongly on people’s attitude towards the game.
Timer variation.
If your games run long, then start a 3-to-5-minute timer at the beginning of each round. Once the timer stops, discussion must stop; the leader must name a team, and players must vote for it, without any further “help” from other players.
Obviously keeping the game short makes it much less time-consuming—our group can play one untimed game in 2 hours, or three timed games. The long game is more intense, but the short games fit better into any given get-together.
More importantly, 40-minute timed games are short enough that resistance members can learn something about the validity of their thought processes. In a longer game, spotting your mistakes after learning people’s true identities is much harder.
Spies, on the other hand, can learn lots of useful technique during a long game, because they know the state of the game, and get strong feedback when suspected or directing suspicion. As such, when we played for a long time without timers, we became much better as spies than as resistance members, and the spies won almost every game. This trend seems to be changing now that we play timed games, but I’ll defer judgment until we’ve played this way at least a dozen more times.
Other variations.
Randomize the order of the rounds, so that they aren’t always shortest first. (This should usually help the resistance, though not always.)
Flip the played cards from each mission one at a time, and stop when you’ve flipped them all, or you’ve flipped enough red cards to sabotage. (This can help the spies.)
Don’t try these until your group has a pretty good idea what’s going on, and you have some reason to suspect that they’d change the stable strategy. I’m not going to describe exactly what these changes are for; that would spoil some of the fun. :)
I think the main reason for this is that without a timer, the spies have every opportunity for motivated continuation, and thus the group never stops on a good team unless every spy has been identified.