Quest is a spiritual successor of the games The Resistance and Avalon from creator Don Eskridge. The Resistance and Avalon are essentially the same game with a different flavor – Resistance is vaguely cyberpunkish in theme while Avalon is Arthurian legend – and a few tweaks. Quest improves (slightly) upon its forebears, but in its core it is very much the same game.

I had played The Resistance before and remembered it as a fun, simple social deduction game. It was a bit slow, because every round players had to vote on the team that would play the success/fail cards. Quest runs a bit more smoothly, because the round leader decides on the teams without voting. I think it is a good adjustment for the flow of the game, although I did like the team-voting as something original and extra tactical.

Some other changes in comparison to the earlier games: you can play with minimum 4 instead of 5 players (yay!); with a magic token the round leader can force a character to play a success card, although Morgana herself (one player) can ignore the token (nice double twist potential); the round leader chooses the next leader instead of passing it on clockwise (yay!); players can only be round leader once; and finally: the Final Quest. If the Evil team manages to win 3 quests before the Good team does, the Good team has a chance to name all Evil characters and still win the game. It is a crazy, all-or-nothing rule that I normally don’t endorse, but in this game it works brilliantly. Tensions rise, everyone tries one last time to present their theory and the fate of the world, the game and – perhaps most of all – your friendship hangs in the balance.

I liked the game. It is basic, but it works. It does not need much more. It is no magical sword in a mysterious stone. But it is good.