Anyone who plays hidden-role games knows the end-of-game reveal—the roles flip face-up, the ally you trusted was lying all night, the read you were sure of was backwards. In The Resistance: Avalon, five to ten players split into Good, who win by passing three of five missions, and Evil, who win by sabotaging three. One catch: a Good player, Merlin, secretly sees who's Evil—and if Good passes three missions, Evil still gets one shot to win by naming him.
That last rule isn't a footnote. It's most of the game. And 12,882 logged games, cross-checked against 20 hand-annotated ones from Avalon-NLU, say so with more precision than anyone at the table gets. They also say something less obvious: the board everyone plays off of carries almost no signal. The liars get found in the talk.
Evil wins 55.9% of games—7,207 of 12,882. Strip out Merlin and the Assassin and play bare The Resistance, where the missions are the only way to win, and Evil drops to 48.3%. A coin flip. Add Merlin back and Evil climbs to 56.6%.
Merlin does help Good; his sight measurably improves which teams get sent. He also hands Evil a second way to win, and that second way is worth more than the missions his sight saves. The player whose entire job is helping Good makes Good lose more often.
Passing three missions isn't winning. It buys a second game only Evil plays, and Evil is good at it: the Assassin names Merlin right 36.7% of the time he's hunted, 2,972 of 8,103.
The hit rate barely moves as the table fills, holding near a third whether Merlin hides among three Good players or six. A blind guess doesn't hold—it falls from one in three to one in six as the good ranks grow. So the edge over chance is skill, and the skill shows up most at a crowded table, where finding Merlin should be hardest.
Eighty-two percent of first missions pass.
New players read that as good news. It isn't news at all. Ask a sharper question: when Evil sits on the mission with enough of its own players to sink it, how often does it let the mission pass instead?
Three times in four on Mission 1. By Mission 5, only 4% of the time—and that 4% is error, not restraint. There is no Mission 6, so cover has no future left to buy, and failing the decider wins outright. Across those 95 games Evil traded a certain win for the Assassin's coin flip and cashed only 38.
So the 82% pass rate measures Evil's patience, not Good's judgment. The board is reporting a decision, and the decision is nearly always the same one.
A fail on a team of k implicates at least one of k, so the suspicion each member picks up divides by team size.
A failed pair leaves each of the two players 58% likely to be Evil, 18 points over the base rate—the fail has nowhere to hide. A failed team of four leaves each member sitting at the base rate: one saboteur among four faces, and the fail says nothing about any single one. Passing runs the other way, and the exculpation deepens with size—shed 10 points riding a clean pair, 26 riding a clean four.
Team size is set by the table, two players a mission at five to seven, three or more above that, and it climbs as the game runs. The cheapest fail to make is a late one on a big team; the most expensive is an early one on a small team. The folk rule, lie low early, has a mechanism under it, and the mechanism is right.
Cover works. Track the same Evil player after Mission 1: lay low and he's picked for 49.8% of later mission slots; strike and he's picked for 17.1%. Lying low nearly triples his access to the board.
And striking wins anyway. Controlling for player count, how many Evil sat on the team, and every optional role, striking Mission 1 is worth 6.1 points of win rate (p=6e-7). The split by team size is the part that matters, because the pricing predicted it before anyone looked: striking is worth 3.4 points on a team of two and 10.9 on a team of three. The bigger the team, the cheaper the fail, so the more a strike is worth—just as dividing suspicion by k implies.
The reason cover loses is that Evil is not one player.
When Evil strikes Mission 1, the striker is finished—17.1% access, frozen out. His partner's access goes up, from 31.9% to 34.7%. The fail hands the table a suspect, the table takes it, and the Evil who wasn't on that team walks free with a fail already banked. Burning one member's cover to buy tempo is a good trade, because the member being burned is not the member who has to finish the job.
Nor does patience buy a better endgame. Lying low produces more assassination shots—Evil reaches one in 59.9% of games instead of 49.5%—but the Merlin hit rate is 38.6% either way. Waiting and watching does not sharpen Evil's read on Merlin. It loses the board and arrives at the same coin flip.
Which leaves Evil doing the wrong thing where it costs most:
On a team of three, where striking is worth ten points, Evil lies low 59.9% of the time. It does adjust—78.5% on a team of two, where the cost of striking is real and the edge is only 2.8 points—so the instinct points the right way. It is nowhere near strong enough. This is observational, and Evil chooses when to strike, so strikers may simply be better players; the defense against that reading is the gradient, which the pricing called in advance and the data reproduces.
Everything so far comes from what players do: cards, proposals, votes. Avalon is also talk. The Avalon-NLU corpus—20 hand-annotated games, 2,384 utterances, every Evil line labeled for deception—lets us ask whether Evil's talk runs on the same clock as Evil's cards.
It doesn't. The cards climb the whole way to the endgame, tracking the collapse of patience: sabotage propensity reaches 96% by Mission 5. Deceptive talk rises early, peaks at Mission 3 at 65.1%, then falls through Missions 4 and 5, while sabotage keeps climbing. When Evil is most dangerous on the board it sounds least like a liar. Its share of the conversation barely moves either—28.5% to 31.7% across all five missions. Same volume, different content.
Take the players the mission board says nothing about—the ones never sent on Mission 1. No cards, no fail to answer for, no pass to hide behind. Nothing.
The table picks Evil for Mission 2 anyway: 31.0% of the time, against 43.1% for Good. An 11.6-point gap on players with no record. Split them by how they voted on the Mission-1 team—public, observable, a hard signal—and the gap survives in both groups, 11.3 points among the approvers and 12.7 among the rejecters.
And it isn't Merlin. Delete him: in bare Resistance, where nobody at the table holds private information about anybody, Evil are still picked 9.1 points less often. Merlin's private sight adds about 2.6 points on top of a read that was already there without him.
So roughly nine of those twelve points are talk. Tone, argument, the shape of a justification, what a player says when nothing has happened yet. In a game whose entire apparatus is information—a role that sees, missions that reveal—the channel that finds Evil is the one carrying no information at all.
Four optional roles complicate the game. Percival sees Merlin, but also sees Morgana, who is built to look like Merlin to him; Mordred is Evil but hidden from Merlin's sight; Oberon is Evil but hidden from his own team. A raw split by role says Morgana lowers Evil's win rate by 2.7 points—help for Good, from a role designed for offense.
Run a logistic regression controlling for player count and every other role across 11,829 games, and the sign flips: +2.7 for Evil, and not significant. The naive number was never measuring Morgana. It was measuring Percival, who is dealt alongside her 98.3% of the time and who helps Good by 7.4 points. Morgana's effect was Percival's effect, read off a correlation before anyone asked what produced it.
Which is the mistake the board invites all game. Judge the missions, and you stay one inference behind the game being played underneath them.