I played my first game of Resist! today.
There are stand-alone scenarios and also a three-scenario “historical campaign” in a second booklet, but I just played the standard game with 10 randomly-selected missions to tackle from the set of 20.
The game has a pretty interesting push-your-luck end condition, whereby you can choose to cut your losses after any mission and end the game with whichever points you’ve acquired thus far (with thresholds for “draw”, “minor victory”, “victory”, and “major victory”), or else you can continue to the next mission and see if you can acquire enough points for a better victory (or even the ultimate “epic victory” if you defeat all missions) – but at the risk of hitting one of the “lose” conditions and ending with nothing at all!
You start with a deck of 12 maquis who are working in secret. These are either randomly dealt from the 24 in the game, or drafted (draw two, keep one), with every maquis having its own special abilities. These “hidden” maquis go to your discard pile after each mission they are involved in, and will be shuffled back into your deck when it is expended; however you can also choose to “reveal” any number of them during a mission in order to perform a more powerful effect as a one-time action, after which you lose them from your deck entirely (i.e. they are captured or killed due to their overt action; a sacrifice for the cause of the resistance). It’s possible but rare to be able to recruit any more (from the 12 which weren’t selected initially), so your starting 12 are largely all you’ll have for the entire game.
Succeeding at missions is fairly tough, so you will commonly be forced to reveal one or more of your maquis in order to avoid worse problems, meaning your deck gets thinner and thinner over the course of the game. Your deck also contains some “spies” which can’t be removed, and so as you slowly reveal and lose your good cards, the chances of drawing spies in your hand gets higher and higher, making it harder and harder to achieve things with each new hand (especially if more spies infiltrate your deck during the game).
So as the enemy squeezes tighter and your “hidden” forces dwindle, you will be wondering whether you can afford to risk one more mission, or if it’s time to accept that you have achieved everything you can. As a thematic decision, I found this quite striking. The card play is somewhat abstract, but it’s definitely not a “pasted on” theme – the sense of being an against-the-odds resistance movement comes through well.
I was much more successful in this first game than I expected, and managed a “major victory” with nine successful missions and 24 points (but burning most of my remaining resources in order to get the ninth, so an “epic victory” was completely out of reach). It’s possible that I had a fortunate set-up, as one only sees about 50% of possible missions and maquis in any given game, and other comments I’ve read have suggested that statistically I shouldn’t have done quite that well in my first game. I look forward to seeing how things go in future plays, and also to checking out some of the scenarios.
Other related things…
- Space-Biff discussing the thematic side of the game.
- SVWAG liked it and will presumably talk about it again in future.
- Card quality seemed fair to me; but as I’d seen BGG comments wishing for better, I sleeved the game before I played. I found the Sleeve Kings 80x120mm sleeves perfect for the large cards, and likewise their 63.5x88mm sleeves for the small cards. There’s not actually very much shuffling going on, though; and mostly it’s only small numbers of cards. The only larger deck is the enemy deck, which I needed to re-shuffle just once mid-game; otherwise (aside from set-up) it’s just your maquis/spy cards, and you’ll mostly only be handling ~15 of them when you shuffle, so you don’t really need to do very much. Although I played it safe I’m inclined to suspect that, so long as you’re not treating the cards roughly, there’s not anything much to worry about.