Today I played the most perfect game of Resistance. It was 5 player base, with let's call them Alice, Beth, Chris and Diane (clockwise from me). Obviously these names are changed.
I'm first mission leader and Resistance. I pick Chris fairly arbitrarily, but he's a quieter player so it's nice to get a little information on him. I downvote. So does he. Everyone else upvotes. Immediately this is weird and interesting. Everyone off mission voted yes, but the two on mission vote no? What does that even mean?
Mission 1 goes ahead and passes. Okay, 1-0 us.
I'm thinking through what this means and say actually, I think there is a deduction to make here. If he's resistance then the two spies voted up a mission with no spies on, while off mission. There's one new player (Alice), one second timer (Beth) and one who I know doesn't think through multiple layers of logic, instead relying on persuading others to do what she feels is best (Diane) so I feel this is very unlikely. As such I am reasonably suspicious of Chris, but play it down a little saying I'm just slightly worried about it. For now I just want to try and watch voting patterns, and proposal patterns.
Alice proposes A, me and D
Beth proposes B, C and D
Chris proposes C, me and A
Diane proposes D, A and B and it passes.
I know this mission is dirty as it's 5 player and I'm clean, so at most 2 of the three on mission are spies. I still suspect Chris so I figure, single spy, gonna fail. But it doesn't, and comes back a pass.
In the past, this might have thrown me off, but here, I immediately start thinking about what's going on. And of course, now Diane is saying oh, Tables and Chris are the spies, just send two of us and we're good, but he won't. Looking at the proposal list (or rather thinking about it), I feel that A and B would have to be partners if either is a spy, since I don't think either would be experienced enough to throw their partner onto the mission (also they'd been quietly talking a fair bit). But C and D looks even more likely. So I make possibly the best play I ever have in a Resistance game: I put A and B on the third mission (it's a two person one). I immediately feel good about this, and explain to everyone why they should be voting it up: If Diane is right, this mission is clean. If she's wrong (about me) then the mission is dirty, and might well contain two spies. So we vote for it.
And I throw in a no vote, entirely by accident. But it does convince A to propose the same thing, with B's backing. D doesn't even really try and fight it, since I promised to vote it up this time (it has A and B voting yes before and C and D vote it down). It's clear we've won as soon as it goes through - and it does.
The mission results come through... two passes. C and D try to fake ignorance of who the spies are, but it's pretty clear to me they've been caught. We all flip our loyalty and indeed, me, A and B won.
Now this probably isn't that exciting of a game to read, and of course my opponents didn't exactly play fantastically (Diane explained after the game, her goal was to try and shift all doubt onto me and keep it there, as I was the most dangerous player against her. But it backfired after I proposed a mission with the two other resistance quickly) but... I felt really good after that game. I read a difficult situation perfectly and responded with a winning move. It just feels so good to do that.
