Saturday was an international tabletop games day

Aside from the leering smile on the “Obey Wheaton’s Law”(whatever that is ::shudder::) posters creeping me the hell out, I had a pretty good time and was glad that I forced myself to get out and game with some folks.

I find that I’m really digging that game Avalon, which is just Resistance-but-with-knights-and-king-arthur. By crazy coincidence, I got the assassin 3 times in a row. One of the alt rules that isn’t from Resistance is that the good-guys can have someone be Merlin, and Merlin gets to know who the traitors are, but Merlin can’t give himself away, because if the good-guys get the requisite 3/5 quests, if the Assassin can guess who Merlin is, the traitors still win.

Now, one would think that whoever is Merlin should try to keep quiet and lie low. But it’s actually the opposite. The person who isn’t acting all wishy-washy and making ludicrous statements is almost without a doubt Merlin. Merlin is too worried that if he suggests “Maybe those guys shouldn’t go on the quest, because they’ll fail it”, we’ll be all pointing and shrieking “MERLIN!”. But I think that to make it work, you HAVE to go out of your way to talk and make suggestions about who to have or not have. Anyway, two out of three games, the traitors won. The first win, we were tempted to let the good guys think they’d won because we both knew who Merlin was. In that case, it was obvious because he was the only one trying to make sensible and subtle suggestions. The second time, where the traitors won by assassinating Merlin, it was because Merlin had stayed too quiet. So the trick is probably that you have to spout out some unproductive nonsense to throw off the notion that you’re privy to useful knowledge.

I could probably try to extrapolate this into a more scholarly psych type jargon-filled post, but I don’t know if it’s worth the effort.

Just mostly wanted to say that I’m always down for some Avalon, and I’m pretty good at picking out Merlin in a pinch.