Review: Avalon

You’ll never have so much fun making your friends distrust each other.

I once had friends I trust, because of this game they are now tenuous allies and scepticism of their every breath is the way of the world. Avalon is what got me into board games and remains a firm favourite despite the mistrust it sows – and everyone else I have introduced it to loves it (except Connor, he thinks it’s just alright).

In Avalon you play as 2 teams; the good guys who have a single job, succeed 3 of 5 quests. And the bad guys who have 2 jobs, fail 3 of 5 quests, or find out who Merlin is. But we’ll come back to that magic sorcerer who's potentially sitting beside you that you’ll learn to love/hate like marmite. Why are these jobs difficult you might ask? Great question, but a bit weird if you had asked it aloud while reading this.

You don’t know who anyone is.

The identity cards are kept secret, the good guys have no idea who anyone is, the bad guys know who each other are but can’t communicate across the table without giving themselves away. You have a game where you suspect every player is only pretending to be good but actually have very different motives. Every successful mission is followed by out cries of “He’s evil! She was bluffing!” with no evidence, but with only 5 missions – you never have time to gather enough evidence.

The game is played with gut calls and wild accusations, except for one player. Merlin.

Merlin, a special character on the good side who also happens to know the identity of every bad guy. Merlin doesn’t need gut calls, they know. However, if they are too obvious about it the bad guys will have a very easy time fulfilling their second way of winning: working out who Merlin is.

Caught in the limbo between leading a team that doesn’t know who they are to victory and not being worked out, playing Merlin is a lot like manipulating your friends to actually turning up to a games night. They should be on your side, they should enjoy this, but no one likes being manipulated.

Why do we like it?

Avalon plays well even with the lowest amount of its 5-10 player count, but really thrives at the 7/8 player mark. It also has a few tools to change the feel and balance of the game in the form of alternative special characters like Merlin. For example; ‘Mordred’ who is evil and unknown to Merlin, ‘Percival’ who is good and knows who Merlin is, ‘Oberon’who is the definition of Loki – Evil but no evil person knows who is evil. For a game that is already something you’d pick up often the extra bits of replay ability that this adds is actually really significant. And we haven’t even mentioned the colossal spanner that is the ‘Lady in the Lake’.

You never get bored of this game, evil players bluffing often causes victims-of-circumstance to be thrown under the bus. Some players talking too much immediately tosses suspicion towards them, other players not talking enough makes you wary if they are Merlin covering their tracks. Often you reach the final 5th quest with 2 success and 2 fails, you now need the perfect team with only the good players – and never a sure idea of who is truly good. Trying to work out who is lying out of a group of 7 other people who all believe you are one of the liars is a strangely invigorating experience.

Even amongst the freshest of indie board game players this has been a huge winner, a single round is all it takes for the rules to settle and often is all that is needed to hook them into playing more. Over the years of owning this and playing it I’ve yet to come across a game that hasn’t finished with some variation of "lets play again" after the first game in the afternoon.

Let’s be honest, that’s all you ever really want out of a board game.

TLDR: 9.82/10 - would play right now.