Review – Resist!

Ever since the COVID lockdowns began in 2020, I’ve become an avid consumer of solitaire games.

One of the more popular solo games that have come out recently, getting great reviews from as disparate sources as Zilla Blitz and Chris Yi on the Dice Tower, is the solo card game Resist!

(The exclamation point is in the title of the game, and I really wish people would stop putting punctuation in the names of things because it makes them difficult to write about coherently).

Resist! was designed by the intrepid team of Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson along with Roger Tankersley, with artwork by Albert Monteys. It was published in 2022 by Salt & Pepper Games.

In the game, you are the Maquis resistance movement in Spain after the Spanish Civil War, fighting the fascist General Franco regime for freedom. Hiding in the mountains, these Maquis members took the fight back to Franco.

It’s also a card game with no dice whatsoever.

Let’s see how it looks.

If you wish to skip the “how to play” description, click here!

In Resist (I’m just leaving the exclamation off from now on, ok?), there are 24 Maquis member cards. Twelve of them are in your resistance cell (called the “Hidden” deck) and twelve of them are in the “Recruit” deck.

There are also six Spy cards, three of which will be shuffled into the Hidden deck, so you will have an initial deck of 15 cards. (Is it a good thing that 20% of your cell is spies, right off the bat? I don’t think so!)

The Mission cards are separated by Era and shuffled separately. You will have four Era 1 cards, three Era 2 cards and three Era 3 cards. The Era 1 cards will be your first four Missions that are available. The other six will fill in openings for successfully-completed Missions.

There are also Enemies! Of course there are. This is war.

The Enemies deck is shuffled and each Mission (as noted on the card) gets a number of face-down Enemies placed on it.

Finally, there’s the Civilian deck, which can end up losing the game for you.

Each card will have from 1-3 Civilians on it, except the 0 card, which gets shuffled back into the deck if you draw it (thankfully!)

You want to limit Civilian casualties as much as possible, because losing five of them will lose you the game.

You will then draw 5 cards from the Hidden deck. Hopefully all five are Maquis!

Each round, you’re going to have four phases: Plan, Attack, Aftermath and Recover.

In the Plan phase, you will be playing some (or all!) of the Maquis members from your hand.

The first choice is whether to play them as Hidden or Revealed (Left and Right respectively). Revealed is often stronger but then they will be captured at the end of the round and out of your deck.

If you are playing them in the Plan phase, then you want to play the ones with a “Plan” ability.

Plan abilities often have you scouting ahead, or perhaps removing some Enemies from missions, or at least revealing who the Enemies are. They may even let you draw more Hidden Maquis!

Of course, you could have my luck and when you draw extra Maquis, they’re actually Spies (which at least gets them out of your deck until you reshuffle).

At the point where you’ve played all of your Maquis that you want to play this phase, you choose one of the Missions to try to complete. If there are still Enemies on that Mission, turn them face-up now.

Then you move to the Attack phase. Here, you play the remainder of your Maquis and execute any “Attack” actions that are on them. Again, you have to decide whether to play them as Hidden or Revealed.

All of the Defend abilities on the Mission and/or Enemies are triggered at this point as well, before you begin playing the rest of your Maquis cards.

You have to play all Maquis cards that are in your hand. You can’t save any of them for later.

Add up the attack value (the number on the top right or left of the card depending on whether you played the Maquis as Hidden or Revealed) and start defeating Enemies or the Mission (or hopefully all of them!)

Each Enemy and Mission have defence values. You spend that much attack value to defeat it.

If the target has a Defeat effect, that triggers now.

Note that you can attack the Mission and leave all the Enemies as survivors if you wish (except that you have to defeat Grunts and Guards first, of course).

Any Survive effect on remaining Enemies then triggers.

That’s usually bad! But sometimes you have to weather it.

Some Survive effects have you draw a card from the Civilian deck. If there is a number on it, that’s how many civilians died, either during the mission or as reprisals. If you ever have 5 civilians in the discard pile, you lose!

In the Aftermath phase, that’s where you check for Civilian loss. That’s also where you check Mission Outcome.

If you successfully defeated the Mission, well done! Take it, you get the VP for it. Replace it with the top card of the Mission deck and place any required Enemies face down on it.

If you didn’t defeat the Mission, flip it over and it stays there, reducing your future options.

Also, if you fail two Missions, you lose!

Finally, you decide whether or not to end the Resistance. Sometimes you’ve just had enough. And if you’re in positive victory points, it may be a no-brainer (depending on how your Hidden Maquis deck is doing). If you have VP, you may wish to do so, in which case the game ends and you win! How well you won depends on your VP.

If you have 1-14 points, then it’s a Draw. Do you really want to end in a Draw?

I didn’t.

You need 19 points to actually have any meaningful victory, as 15-18 just gives you a minor victory and the Resistance is ultimately defeated (but later, after you’re long gone, so you yourself have won the game…kind of).

You discard all of the played Hidden Maquis, moving the Revealed Maquis to the Revealed discard pile (they are out of the game unless another Maquis card’s effect lets you bring it back). You also discard your Spies and draw 5 more cards.

Hey, guess what! If you draw 5 Spies (some effects add Spies to your Hidden deck), you lose!

Such a forgiving game.

Anyway, the game continues like that until either you lose (likely) or you decide to end the Resistance and reap the victory (or at least revel in the fact that you didn’t lose).

Is Resist a game where you defend the downtrodden and bring ultimate freedom to your people? Or is it a game where you have the fascist boot embedded in your forehead?

Thompson and Benjamin never disappoint as designers, and this follows that trend. They are great designers that always come up with interesting concepts.

Resist works because even though all you are doing is playing cards to the table in certain ways, you almost become attached to your Maquis members in some way.

When you are trying to decide which way to play the Maquis in your hand, and you realize you need to play one of them Revealed (either for their strength or their ability, or maybe both!), the fact that you will be losing that card for the rest of the game (for the most part, anyway) is almost agonizing.

Not to mention making the game more difficult!

As I mentioned above, fully 20% of your deck consists of Spies, and some Enemies that you fail to defeat will just add more Spies to it.

There are ways to mitigate that, of course. Some Maquis give you the ability to discard a Spy from your hand and draw a new Hidden card. Others just let you draw a new card. Hopefully it’s not a Spy!

Some Maquis members will let you draw a card from the Recruit deck, effectively adding them to your deck. Or maybe even one of your tragically lost compatriots!

Breaking them out of jail, maybe?

Of course, you notice something about all six of these cards I’m talking about, right?

That’s right.

These powerful abilities are on their Revealed side, which means that they will be removed from your deck.

You may get rid of a Spy, but you are also getting rid of a Maquis.

You may get a new (or returning!) recruit, but at the expense of one of your other Maquis.

You will never have more than 12 Maquis in your deck.

It can be painful.

Then there are the Missions, and all of the Enemies that appear on them.

There will be a lot of cards on the table at times.

Yet the table space required is actually not that big. I play it on my small table at home (which you can see in the picture) and it fits quite nicely.

Like most solo games, there are a bunch of ways to lose and only one way to win, and this makes the choices in this game really difficult.

Sure, it’s a card game. There is going to be luck.

Hell, all six of the cards shown above, that get rid of Spies or get you new Recruits, may all end up in the Recruit deck and you’ll never see them!

Even with that luck of the draw, though, you make the decision on how to allocate your strength to defeat the Mission or Enemies.

You decide what remains standing, though your choices get more restricted as you approach the losing conditions.

Do you leave the Counter-Guerilla alive, when you have already lost four Civilians?

There are only 8 Civilian cards, and if you’ve already discarded one of the 2s and two of the 1s, there’s only a 20% chance you will draw the “0” card.

You have to defeat the Mission though, don’t you?

You technically don’t, if you haven’t lost a Mission yet. You can lose one Mission before losing the second Mission causes you to lose the game.

I love the choices you have to make. Do you play this Maquis revealed for their extra strength? Or their awesome ability? Even though you know you will lose that Maquis after this round? Losing Maquis will just increase the ratio of Spies to Maquis in your deck, and you won’t have that Maquis’ ability to use anymore!

What do you do?

This is a hard game to win. I haven’t won it in three tries.

My first game was the closest I even came to a minor victory. I was one Mission away from getting 14 points, but my deck was not in good shape.

I was going to End the Resistance after my next successful Mission, since I didn’t want my first game to end in a draw.

I ended up losing on that Mission, failing to defeat it for my 2nd loss, and it was heart-breaking.

I haven’t even come close to that since then.

This is a devilish game.

But it’s devilishly attractive!

It makes me want to play it again to see if I can do better.

The artwork on the cards is so gorgeous and stylized. They’re also sturdy oversized cards that are easy to shuffle.

I love the components.

The game also comes with 8 scenarios, which I haven’t tried yet.

I want to win the actual game first!

All of my games have been around 30 minutes, so it’s also a great way to spend a lunch hour when you don’t have any other people to game with!

Or a nice evening of solo games.

What do I really like about this game, though?

Even though it’s a deck of cards, it makes you feel for these types of resistance movements, all over the world. Freedom fighters who sometimes have to sacrifice their own lives for the greater good.

I wasn’t kidding when I said that the choice to play a Maquis on their Revealed side is agonizing.

Yes, you know you need to do it to win the game or, if this were the real world, to meet your objective and maybe make the world a better place for your fellow citizens.

But can you do it?

Can you really sacrifice Jacinto for that?

These people are just pictures on a card.

But playing Resist, they almost feel more than that at times.

That’s the sign of a great design, and a great game.

Because this one makes you think about right and wrong in the real world.

Maybe just a little bit, before you play the next card.

But it’s there.

This review was written after 3 plays