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Your Move: The Resistance

Samuel McConnell
/
KMUW

The Resistance is a card game for up to 10 people. You can play this with your friends, but I should caution that they probably won’t be your friends during the game.

In this game, most players are the good guys working for the Resistance, while up to four players are spies working against the Resistance. The game plays very simply: on your turn, you form a group of two or three players to go on a mission. If everyone you choose to be on your team is one of the good guys, you succeed in your mission. However, if someone you choose is a spy, they have the option of secretly making the mission fail. And when a mission fails is when this game gets interesting, with the innocent players trying to figure out who the spies are, and with the spies slanderously blaming others for the failure.

The safest course of action if you are member of the Resistance is to assume everyone is lying to you and that everyone assumes you are lying. If, however, you are a spy, things get a little deeper.

You see, the spies want the mission to fail, but they have to maintain their cover. At first a new player might make every mission they are a part of fail, but that will make it easier for everyone else to tell that you may not be who you claim to be.

You only have five missions to figure out who might be the spies. If the spies win three times, the Resistance fails. If the good guys can pass three missions, then the Resistance wins.

When I’m playing the game, I always think I have it completely figured out. Invariably, though, one player I was absolutely certain was a member of the Resistance ends up being a spy.

The game is quick. It only takes about 10 or 15 minutes to get through five missions, depending on how much finger pointing is going on, and then you can play again with different spies.

There are some other games like this one, like the Battlestar Galactica board game, but The Resistance is simpler, faster, and I think because of that, more fun. Because it can be found relatively cheaply, this game has one of the highest dollar-to-fun ratios in my entire game collection.

Samuel McConnell is a games enthusiast who has been playing games in one form or another since 1991. He was born in northern Maine but quickly transplanted to Wichita.