I have a few thoughts and questions about strategy in The Resistance, one of them being “is there actually much strategy in this game at all?” ;). Not putting it in the ongoing Resistance game thread because spectator comments are understantably prohibited, and it’s not really about that particular game anyway.
To start with, it seems to me that in the first round, where a two-person team is nominated, the rational play for all players is to reject any team that does not include themselves (meaning that teams will be rejected until the last proposal, which must be accepted or the spies immediately win.)
My reasoning is this:
(Assumption: players play rationally. Resistance players have nothing to hide, and misinformation just helps the spies. Meanwhile, I assume spies avoid silly mistakes like all voting to fail a spy-only mission.)
(Assumption: it is always in the interests of the resistance to have resistance members on a team. Even if the mission fails, it narrows down the potential culprits.)
Resistance members know nothing except that they themselves are resistance. They never know for certain who the other resistance members are until the game is effectively over.
Therefore a resistance member should always prefer a team that includes themselves to one that doesn’t.
Therefore anyone who votes at this stage for a team that doesn’t include themselves is a spy.
Therefore spies should not vote like that, otherwise they’ll give themselves away.
Therefore all first-round proposed teams should be rejected by the majority of players who aren’t in the team, until the last proposal which will be accepted. (Players can always hope that the last proposal will include them.)
It plays very differently in person from forums, based on my one and only forum game. Group dynamics are also very important. If you play with the guy who does interviews for CPS, assume he reads everybody correctly. If you play with my wife, do not assume she is rational or playing to win; she appears to play primarily to thwart my attempts to find out who others are, even when she’s on my team. Robert can’t lie worth a damn.
One thing I think that’s missed by new players is voting to reject. It’s my default position. Votes tell you something. One think I think that was overlooked in the first game was the value of seeing who leaders put on a team as well. Votes are a little information. Team composition is potentially a lot of information, so seeing more teams proposed is a good thing. I was stressing votes, which was probably the less important aspect of the rejections. (I hope learned a lot from being so thoroughly destroyed in that game.)
Another mistake was pre-polling the group to get a feel of a team. It seems all nice and Resistance, but I get the impression it helps the spies in the long run. It’d be better to “vote your gut” the first round, then ask for it to be resubmitted if it was close but you think it was favorable. We should have known how bad the last team was when everybody liked it before it was submitted.
I agree that the first team should be rejected by non-members if there is symmetric knowledge (vanilla Resistance), effectively making the fifth team the default team. This is the one instance where I see the value of a pre-poll, especially in PbF. TT, it moves so much faster and there are more opportunities to get reads on a player.
I think that a two-person mission is pretty much always going to succeed, no matter who’s on it. Even in the ideal (for spies) case of one spy on the team, who wants to put on a neon sign that says that at least one of them or another guy is a spy? The corollary to this is that the voting for the teams in the first round doesn’t matter much, either: If it’s going to succeed no matter what, then why not approve just any old team? Effectively, a start with a 2-person team is just a game where the Resistance only needs 2 successes to win while the Spies still need 3.
Exactly. Cut to the chase and just pick the first team at random. Nobody has any rational basis to object, except the person who would be last chooser, because they would choose themselves, and their proposal would be accepted.
I’m wondering if seven is a good number for this game, under vanilla rules. It means that spies are close in number to resistance, and they of course have the big advantages of knowing who the opposition is, and only needing one vote in missions.
I’ve been doing a bit of number-crunching and it seems to me that under vanilla rules, even with no collusion among spies, they should win the seven-player game more often than not. With collusion, or some kind of convention that minimises simultaneous fail votes, spies come out even better.
The variants in which the good guys also have some inside information look like they’re a lot harder to analyse, so those versions may be strategically richer.
Forgot to mention: one thing my number-crunching demonstrated to me was that my claim that “resistance members never know for certain who the other resistance members are until the game is effectively over” is wrong. It is possible for resistance members to become known to other resistance members while the result is still in doubt, in later rounds.
In dire situations, maybe. If the Spies already have two points on the board, and a mission is a success, then it can be taken as given that everyone on that mission was genuine Resistance.
But of course, that’s the sort of situation you’d really prefer to avoid getting into in the first place. And anything short of that, a successful mission could just mean that the spies chose to make it a success.
At this point the resistance knows for certain that the two unused players are resistance. It could continue as follows:
Mission 3: resistance3-resistance4-resistance2, success-success-success, score 1-2
Mission 4: same team plus one other from team 2, success-success-success-success, score 2-2 (there’s no point in a lone spy voting fail in mission 4)
Mission 5: resistance doesn’t know whether team 4 is clean. Use the same team or switch the fourth member? It’s a toss-up.
That only works if the Spies are so ballsy as to all fail a mission which consists entirely of Spies. I don’t think that’d ever be optimal play, unless that mission will determine the fate of the game.
I didn’t say it was optimal, although I don’t think it’s as bad as you suggest. I think if two spies are the team on mission 1, they win the game 40% of the time if they vote fail-fail. If they are colluding or have a mechanism for avoiding fail-fail*, then voting success-fail may be the optimal play. If not, perhaps they should both vote for success, although I’m not sure yet whether that is any better than fail-fail. Spies need three failed missions, and mission 4 is hard to fail.
For example, if you are a spy and another mission member is also a spy, vote fail with probability 0.3. This generates success-fail 42% of the time, fail-fail 9%, success-success 49%. It does need some way of generating reasonably random numbers in your head, but there are ways.
Another thing about the live game is that spies don’t really have time to consider what their vote is going to be. In a situation where there are multiple spies on one mission, they’ve got to make all their considerations/secret communication in a very short period of time. After all, Resistance never has to think about how they’re going to vote when they’re on a mission.
The pbp format gives spies a lot more time to be thoughtful and deliberate, and that means less screwing up.
Oh sure. Understand that I am not trying to slam The Resistance as a game. I think it is an excellent game. But I see comments about it, along the lines of “a social game, with some depth.” It’s the “depth” part that I am contesting. I suspect that any depth is illusory and, played as a purely strategic game, it is actually fairly mechanical. The fun comes from players making mistakes, because as you say it is a fast game played under pressure. So in strategic terms it’s more like speed chess than serious chess.
If you really wanted to play The Resistance as a serious game, which may be a contradiction in terms, I think the best approach would be to say little and ignore what other people say, and mostly how they vote on proposed teams. I bet that seasoned players already ignore whatever blather the other players come out with. The only concrete information is the mission vote. In everything else, it is usually in the interest of spies to act just like resistance.