A printable Avalon quest log lives or dies on a vote nobody can reconstruct from memory, because the people who played it are the least reliable witnesses in the room. The quest that ended the game had a fail card in it, and by the time the assassination guess is made nobody agrees on whether that fail should have ended the quest, who voted to approve the team, or how many rejections the round had already burned. It cannot say whether the fail came from the player everyone suspected, and the argument that follows is exactly the argument the log exists to settle.
That is the gap a quest log fills. Avalon is a game of hidden loyalty: good players must complete three quests, evil players must fail three, and every quest is decided by a team proposal, a public vote, and a secret handful of success and fail cards. The cards themselves stay secret — nobody ever learns who played the fail — but everything around them is public and forgettable: who proposed which team, who approved and who rejected, how many fails the quest took, and where the vote track stood. A buyer who prints a log sheet for each game keeps all of it: every proposal, every vote, every quest result, and the final assassination guess, in the order they happened.
What the log has to record
An Avalon game is a sequence of proposals, not a scorecard, so the log must follow the sequence quest by quest. For each quest, the log records the leader, the proposed team, and every player's public vote — approve or reject — by name. It records the quest result as a count only: how many success cards and how many fail cards were revealed, never who played which, because the game never reveals that and a log that pretended to know would be fiction. It records the running quest score, the vote-track count for the round, and, at the end, the assassination guess and whether it was right.
The log also records the two things groups argue about after the game. First, the vote track: five consecutive rejected teams in a single quest round hand the game to evil immediately, so a log that does not count rejections cannot tell a group how close it came to losing on votes alone. Second, the fail threshold: most quests fail on a single fail card, but the fourth quest with seven or more players needs two fails to fail — a single fail still succeeds. That exception is the single most argued-over rule in the game, and it is exactly the rule a log sheet has to print on its face, because the group that forgets it will call a successful quest a failure and spend the rest of the night arguing about a result the rules already settled.
The rules the log is built on
Avalon plays with five to ten players, split into good and evil. Good wins by completing three quests; evil wins by failing three, by forcing five rejected teams in one round, or by correctly naming Merlin after good completes three quests. Each quest has a required team size that depends on the player count — with seven players, the quests take two, three, three, four, and four players in order. The leader proposes exactly that many players, and everyone votes at once: more than half must approve, and a tie rejects. A rejected team advances the vote track and passes leadership clockwise for another proposal on the same quest.
Quest cards are secret and one-sided in a way that matters for the log. Good players must play success; evil players may play success or fail, which is why a successful quest proves nothing about any individual on the team. Most quests fail on one fail card. The fourth quest with seven or more players is the exception: it needs two fails, and one fail still succeeds. After three successful quests, the game does not simply end — evil discusses, and the player holding the Assassin card names one good player as Merlin. A correct guess steals the game for evil; a wrong guess confirms the win for good.
A worked game: seven players, one lone fail
Seven players sit down: Ana, Ben, Carla, Dan, Erin, Frank, and Grace. Four are good, three are evil, and the log follows the public record only — it never claims to know who played a fail card, only how many were revealed.
Quest 1 takes two players. Leader Ana proposes Ana and Ben. The vote is six approvals to one rejection — only Grace rejects — so the team goes. Two success cards are revealed, and the quest succeeds. Good leads one to nothing.
Quest 2 takes three players. Leader Ben proposes Ben, Carla, and Erin. The vote is five approvals to two rejections — Ana and Grace reject — so the team goes. Two success cards and one fail card are revealed, and the quest fails. The score is one apiece.
Quest 3 takes three players. Leader Carla proposes Carla, Dan, and Ana. The vote is unanimous, seven approvals, and the team goes. Three success cards are revealed, and the quest succeeds. Good leads two to one.
Quest 4 takes four players, and this is the quest the log exists for. Leader Dan proposes Dan, Ana, Frank, and Grace. The vote is four approvals to three rejections — Dan, Ana, Carla, and Ben approve; Erin, Frank, and Grace reject — and four of seven is more than half, so the team goes. Three success cards and one fail card are revealed. At any other quest, or with fewer players, that single fail would end the quest in failure. But this is the fourth quest with seven players, so it needs two fails, and one fail still succeeds. Good completes its third quest, and the score is three to one.
Then comes the assassination. Evil discusses, and Frank, holding the Assassin card, names Ben as Merlin. The guess is wrong — Ben is Percival, not Merlin — so good wins the game. Count it on the log: four quests, twelve quest cards revealed in total, ten successes and two fails, and the only fail counts that mattered were the one on Quest 2, which failed it, and the one on Quest 4, which did not. Without the log, the group would have spent the night arguing that Quest 4 should have failed. With it, the answer is on one line: fourth quest, seven players, two fails required, one revealed.
What a buyer actually prints
One log sheet per game, so a game night of four games prints four sheets — or one sheet per game with a game-number box if the group plays a series. Each sheet carries the game date, the player count, the quest-size row for that count, and a quest table: quest number, leader, proposed team, each player's vote, success and fail counts, and the running score. The footer carries the vote-track count, the assassination guess, and the final result, plus a printed reminder of the fourth-quest two-fail rule at seven or more players, because that is the rule the sheet will be consulted for.
Print it on plain paper, one side only, because the back of a log sheet in a party game becomes a coaster within minutes. Black-and-white is fine; nothing on the sheet needs color, and a buyer printing a sheet per game does not want to pay for color ink to record a game about lying to their friends. Sell it as a PDF the buyer prints at home, in packs of ten-game sets, and include a one-page worked example — the seven-player game above — so the first group that buys it does not have to learn the sheet by trial and error.
The honest caveats
This is an unofficial, fan-made log sheet, not a product of the game's publisher, and it does not include the game's character cards, quest cards, or vote tokens — the buyer already owns the game and is buying a way to keep its arguments honest. It does not fix the game's real weakness, which is that a brilliant deduction evaporates the moment the cards are shuffled for the next game; that is precisely the problem it solves, but only if the group actually fills it in during play, and a group that will not pause for ten seconds per vote will not get value from it. And it will not make anyone better at spotting a liar, which is fine, because the log is not a lie detector — it is a record, and the record is what settles the argument after the liar has already won or lost.
The pitch to a seller is simple: Avalon's best moment is the post-game argument, and the argument is the one part of the game that leaves no record. A printable quest log is the record. Price it like a party-game accessory, not a textbook — a few dollars for a pack the buyer prints forever — and the buyer who argues about a lone fail on the fourth quest will come back for the next pack when the next game night needs one.
Disclaimer: an unofficial fan-made log sheet for Avalon. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the game's publisher. The game itself, its character cards, and its quest cards are sold separately.
Top comments (0)