A printable The Resistance mission log lives or dies on a failed mission nobody can explain, because the whole game runs on secret votes that leave no trace: the mission that comes back with one Fail card in it, and five players all insisting it was not them. The game ended with the Resistance winning three missions to two, and by the time the table argues about it nobody agrees on who proposed which team, who voted for it, or which mission actually failed. A log sheet that records the proposed team, every player's approve-or-reject vote, and the mission result as they happen is the only record that settles that argument, and it is a record no one at the table is keeping, because everyone is too busy accusing each other to write anything down.
The Resistance, for the seller who has never played it: five to ten players, secret teams, five missions, first side to three wins. A minority of players are Spies; the rest are Resistance. The Spies know each other from the opening eye-closed reveal; the Resistance know nobody. Each round a Leader proposes a mission team of a fixed size from the board's chart — in a five-player game the sizes are two, three, two, three, three — and every player, on the team or not, votes to approve or reject it in secret. A majority approves the team; a tie counts as a rejection. If the team is rejected, leadership passes to the next player and a new team is proposed; five consecutive rejections on one mission hand the game to the Spies outright. If the team is approved, each team member secretly plays a Success or Fail card. Resistance members must always play Success; a Spy may play either. The cards are shuffled and revealed as a count only, never attributed: a single Fail card fails the mission, except the fourth mission on seven-or-more-player boards, which needs two. Nobody ever learns who played the Fail card — only that somebody on that team did.
Here is the game the log is built for. Five players: Maya, Ben, Carla, Leo, and Sam. Two of them are Spies — Ben and Sam — and the other three are Resistance, though nobody at the table knows that yet. Mission one, team size two: Leader Maya proposes herself and Leo. The vote is four approves to one reject — Sam rejects. Both play Success, so the mission succeeds. Resistance one, Spies zero. Mission two, team size three: Leader Ben proposes himself, Carla, and Sam. The vote is three approves to two rejects — Maya and Leo reject. One Fail card comes back, so the mission fails. Resistance one, Spies one. Mission three, team size two: Leader Carla proposes herself and Leo. The vote is five approves, zero rejects. Both play Success, so the mission succeeds. Resistance two, Spies one. Mission four, team size three: Leader Leo proposes himself, Maya, and Ben. The vote is four approves to one reject — Sam rejects again. One Fail card comes back, so the mission fails. Resistance two, Spies two. Mission five, team size three, winner takes the game: Leader Sam proposes himself, Maya, and Carla. The vote is three approves to two rejects — Leo and Ben reject. All three play Success, so the mission succeeds, and the Resistance win three missions to two.
Now picture the same table without the log. Ben insists the mission-two failure was Sam's, because Ben proposed that team himself and would never sabotage his own proposal — and if Sam failed it, then Sam is the Spy and Ben is clean. The log says something narrower and more useful than either man's story: the mission-two team was Ben, Carla, and Sam, so the Fail card came from one of those three, and nothing more. But the log keeps going, and that is where it earns its keep. Mission four failed with the team Leo, Maya, and Ben, so its Fail card came from one of those three. The only name on both failed teams is Ben. That does not convict him — two different Spies could have failed the two missions, Sam on the second and Leo on the fourth, with Ben passing both — but it turns a five-way shouting match into one prime suspect plus a short list, and the vote record sharpens it further: Sam was the lone reject on the clean first mission, then sat on the failed second team, then rejected the fourth mission too. The log does not name the failer. It structures the accusation: suspect sets from the teams, a prime suspect from the overlap, and a voting pattern no one can misremember. Sam stays suspected, not convicted — he also played on the winning fifth mission, and a Spy passing to hide is exactly what a Spy would do — and that unfinished argument is the reason the group reaches for the log again next game.
That is also why the log has to be designed for the table, not for the argument afterwards. Five missions, up to five rejected proposals per mission, and a vote from every player on every proposal is a lot of writing if the sheet asks for it all in sentences. The sheet that works is one row per mission with the team size printed, a box for the proposed names, a column per player for approve or reject marked with a single letter, and a box for the Success/Fail count — plus a small rejection tally down the side, because the fifth consecutive rejection ends the game and nobody at the table is counting. Anything fancier gets abandoned by mission three, and an abandoned log is worse than no log, because the buyer blames the sheet for slowing the game down. The seller's job is to make the sheet disappear into the game: big handwriting lines, no decoration in the writing area, and the vote record as a simple grid, not a paragraph.
The honest limits matter, and the listing should say them plainly. A log will not name the Spy on any single failed mission — the Fail cards are revealed as an anonymous count, so one failed mission only ever narrows the suspects to the team, and even overlapping failed teams only yield a prime suspect, never proof, because two different Spies could have failed two different missions. It will not work if the table will not pause for ten seconds per vote to mark approves and rejects, because a vote record reconstructed from memory after the reveal is just another opinion with boxes around it. And it only covers the base game the sheet prints — expansion roles and plot cards need their own edition, and the listing should say which roles are on it. A group that votes by shouting instead of tokens will not get value from it.
The pitch to a seller is simple: The Resistance's best moment is the reveal when the player everyone trusted turns out to have been on every failed mission, and the argument about that moment is the one part of the game that leaves no record. A printable mission 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 who failed mission two will come back for the next pack when the next game night needs one.
Disclaimer: an unofficial fan-made log sheet for The Resistance. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the game's publisher. The game itself and its cards are sold separately.
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