My first thought was that it was always a bad idea to fail the first mission as a spy. As there are only two people on the mission, the spy has revealed himself to one of the players.
With 5 players though, it seems like the spies give too much away when succeeding. Is failing the first mission (as a spy) a bad idea even in a 5-player game?
Are there any other situations?
No.
You should almost never let the first mission succeed as a spy. So what if your opponents know that one of the participants is a spy? They don't know which one, and they won't be able to win without figuring out which of you it is.
By making the first mission fail, you give your opponents fewer opportunities to make mistakes as the game progresses. This greatly outweighs the fact that failing a later mission reveals less information.
You do need to get your acting skills into high gear immediately after the mission is revealed as a failure, however. You have to pretend it's obvious to you that your mission-mate was a spy, and appear extremely frustrated if the other players side with her. This can be challenging, but you can't afford to sacrifice a victory point to avoid it.
In The Resistance, the biggest danger is having a consistent strategy that is predictable. As a spy, I usually don't fail the first mission if there's only one other person on it, but sometimes I will. If there are 2 other players on it I'm much more likely to sabotage, but still not every time. Being on a successful mission almost guarantees that I'll be included in later missions with more people allowing me to cast doubt more effectively on others because "I was on that successful mission!"
In groups where people tend to play too consistently I find myself getting bored; it seems like the game is determined completely by luck of who gets picked to go on missions.
I'd say no.
I've never played with just 5 players - only with 6, 7 and 8. And we're all still pretty new to the game seeing as the spies have always won and hardly any teams get rejected.
Basically, the question is if an early start is better than reduced suspicion. In most of our games the first missions have succeeded, even though some contained spies. In our later games the spies usually only won with the 4th or 5th missions, so I'd guess that with more proficient resistance players it becomes more lucrative to fail the first mission.
Five players is a difficult situation though, since there is only one other spy. I'd say that you should probably not fail the mission unless you or the other spy are directly after the second mission member. You'll want to quickly establish evidence that you are not the spy.
No,
I disagree with the answer that says to always fail the first one. Unpredictability is usually a huge part of the strategy for the evil team.
I played a game just last night where the first quest was 2 people, both evil. They passed the mission added a third good person, passed the second mission. Then managed to sail through the rest of the game without suspicion and fail the next 3 missions consecutively.
I think it depends a lot on the situation. If I'm evil and on the first team sometimes I will fail it if I have another evil person on the team, so we can just cast suspicion on each other and hopefully the good team will never suspect us both, but this involves signaling so we don't both fail it.
I'll also fail it if I think I can convince everyone one of the other team members is guilty.
But depending on the order it can be beneficial to pass the first mission, also sometimes I end up on a team with someone I know is extremely vocal and once they know I'm evil will stop at nothing to have me off the team, so if it is a team of 2 I'm usually more wary to fail it.
Another thing to keep in mind is if you are playing the Avalon addition and are Mordred you could give yourself away to Merlin, which is a huge disadvantage for the evil team. Its better to get a known evil person on the team to fail it or hide in a team of 4.
