Shadows over Camelot

Shadows Over Camelot is a co-op board game where the knights of the round table face many difficult and arduous quests to defend Camelot. By completing quests, knights acquire white swords for the round table, and by failing quests, knights acquire black swords for the round table. Once the table has 12 swords, if the majority are white, the good knights win. Otherwise, they all lose. The knights also lose if all knights die or if 12 siege engines accumulate outside of Camelot.

A turn goes as follows:
-Progress evil by either adding a siege engine, losing 1 health, or drawing and resolving a black card. Black cards usually go towards harming the knights in completing their quests, but they can also have more dire effects as well.
-Take a heroic action, which can be moving to a new location, playing a ‘good’ white card from their hand, typically towards the completion of a quest, or drawing two white cards if they’re at Camelot.
-Doing a second different heroic action at the cost of 1 life point.
-At any time during a player’s turn, he can use his character’s special ability.

Some of the quests that can be completed include retrieving Excalibur from the lake, finding the Holy Grail, defeating the black knight, fighting saxons, and more.

Shadows Over Camelot also adds a traitor aspect where the game may or may not have a traitor in the game. This player is trying to sabotage the quests and make the knights lose the game. When the progression of evil is bad enough, players can accuse others of being the traitor, scoring either white swords for being correct, or black swords for being incorrect. Throughout the game, opportunities arise where the traitor can oust himself in order to do something terrible to the other knights. Then, for the rest of the game, the traitor hinders the knights by either discarding their white cards or adding siege engines.

Overall, I think this game is a lot of fun. It’s a good co-op game that is fairly resistant to a single player trying to reign control of all of the other players due to not being allowed to say what’s in your hand. Somebody can still play dominantly to a small extent though.
The components are amazing. They have color-coded dice for each knight to represent health, and fully designed miniatures for each knight, saxons, quest rewards, and more. The board is designed with beautiful artwork and clear designated locations for each character that can be placed at every quest. The box also has great storage for all of the pieces, which is always hard to come by in a game.

Pros:
-Turns are simple
-Excellent components and artwork
-Great replayability
-Fun theme

Cons:
-The game starts to feel easy after a lot of play. The traitor helps to balance this to some extent.
-Some rules can be a little confusing

Shadows over Camelot is a coop game set, SURPRISE! in Arthurian legend.

By the way, I just learned that “Arthurian” is a word recognized by spell check. That is how important it is!

I cannot stress enough the team dynamic required in this game. You will not be able to win if everyone goes off to save Camelot on their own. It just isn’t happening.

This game also has a (optional)traitor aspect, so when in use, one player is trying to undermine the good of the whole. Like any good traitor dynamic, no one knows who they are, or even if there is one, which can add to the tension in the game.

So, lets look in the box. You get 1 gameboard with the round table and a couple of quest locations, three other boards with quest locations, 16 swords of the round table, 168 cards, 7 Knight character cards, 7 six-sided dice used to track life and 1 eight sided die, two rulebooks and 30 miniatures. Nothing seems overly cheap.

The game plays 3-7. Each player is going to pick a random knight from the character cards. Each Knight has a special ability unique to them, such as being able to play extra cards, get extra cards, gain extra life, etc. If using the traitor, the 8 loyalty cards are shuffled and handed out randomly. Only one is a traitor card, so there is no telling who they are or if a traitor even exists.

Your overall goal is to fill the Round Table with more white swords than black. You do this by completing quests. Everyone gets 5 white cards and a Merlin card. You are supposed to each take a card from your hand and put it face up in front of you at the beginning of the game and discuss who gets them in what the rules call a gesture of collaboration. Someone may choose to take none, and the group may decide to give several to one player. After this, you start departing for quests. You can discuss in general terms what the cards in your hand may be useful for, but you can never give values, such as saying “I have three Grail cards, so I can help with that quest” Some quests, such as the Grail and Excalibur, can have several knights working the quest at once, and some, like the Black Knight and Lancelot, can only have one knight doing them at a time.

On your turn, you have several things to choose from. You can either

Move to a new quest or Camelot
Perform a quest action
Play a special white card
Heal yourself of a hit point
Make an accusation of a suspected traitor (when allowed)

In addition, when in Camelot, you can choose from

Draw two white cards
Fight a Siege Engine

Movement consists of “I am going to do this quest” and going there. Generally, you can play one card a turn, and specific white cards are used for specific quests. This is the quest action.

Special white cards have implications and beneficial abilities beyond just playing a card on a quest action. To heal oneself, you discard three cards of the same type and get a hit point back (bad idea, by the way)

Each knight can only accuse someone of being the traitor once per game, and only when 6 siege engines are placed or 6 swords. The traitor can accuse someone falsely just to add a black sword.

Every player on their turn must draw a black card, which represents the forces of the world working against you. These cards populate the various quests on the board that you are endeavoring to complete.

For instance, to complete the Excalibur quest, you discard a white card to move the sword closer to the knights side of the lake. However, if a black Excalibur card is chosen, it moves the other direction. Ignoring the quest will cause the sword to fall to the forces of darkness and two black swords will be added to the table.

The grail is similar. The knights in this case must place specific grail cards on the track and fill it with 7 white cards. However, there are different kinds black cards that can fill the grail track, and some require a white grail card to just remove them, requiring two cards to fill the slot that black card sat on. Should the darkness take the grail, you get three black swords.

There are also quests to take on the Black Knight, where you need to take fight cards, a type of white card that has a number, 1-5 assigned, and create a full house, turn by turn. Only one knight can participate. There are Black Knight cards with values that accumulate, and the first party, the Black Knight or the player, gets five cards, then the totals are tallied. The highest value wins. A white sword is one or a black sword is given, then the quest resets.

There are also Saxtons and Picts to fight. Knights can lay down fight cards in a straight. Should a straight be laid before four of that type of enemy appears (caused, once again, by certain black cards)yet another white sword is won and then that quest resets again. A loss gets a black sword on the table and 2 siege engines.

Oh, yeah, siege engines. Get enough of these puppies (12) and the game is over. Here’s the thing. Quests that do not reset, such as Excalibur and the grail, those cards still show up. Should they do so, a siege engine gets laid down outside Camelot since that effect cannot take place.

The Merlin cards mentioned before are used to counter a black card when drawn. It takes three to get rid of the nasty ones, so three players will need to agree to part with the cards. The only way to get more of the standard white cards is to spend a turn in Camelot (netting two cards) and do nothing else, or complete quests. There is a bit more, but that should be sufficient to give you an idea of what you are up against. You can choose to, instead of picking a black card, give up a life point or lay a siege engine. This gives a bit of risk/reward to the strategy. I have seen several games where someone had to die to make sure the game kept going. Once the 12th sword is laid down, the most swords, white or black, wins, tie to evil. The traitor wins if present if darkness descends.

OK, so how do I feel about this game? There is a great deal of tension created by the fact the game is constantly giving you fires to put out. This is not necessarily bad, and I enjoy the concept in games like Red November. Forcing the players to work together is a good concept as far as I am concerned as well.

The problem is I really do not care for this game, and I really cannot tell you why. When my friends and family pull it out to play, I play, but I don’t get a great deal of joy out of it. I tend to feel a sense of foreboding when playing caused by the progression of evil and a sense of urgency to deal with the problems it causes, but I would assume that was intended. If cornered and asked, I would say my biggest issue is that there is a certain formula to winning the game that just puts me off. If you fail the grail and Excalibur, the game is pretty much written off. Should you succeed at those, victory is almost assured. To make the comparison again, in Red November, when things start going wrong, they are random. The consequences to ignoring certain things is pretty much equal. That isn’t the case in Shadows over Camelot. In addition, in Red November, failure, with the right group anyway, is humorous. Imagining your drunk gnome passing out has an amusing bent to it. Games that I have lost in Shadows tend to end up in arguments about who could have done what. It isn’t light hearted at all. In addition to that, I really don’t understand what the end game here is. What am I fighting for? If I get 7 white swords, the Picts and Saxtons are just going to leave Camelot alone forever? The Dragon is just going to fly off with the Black Knight? These are really all minor quibbles, but they seem to pile up for me and give me a sense of “meh” when playing.

So, take my opinion for what it is worth. Lots of people like this game, and I hope I gave you enough unbiased information aside from my opinion to be able to tell if this is right for you and your group. For me, I would rather play something else, but I will play when asked.

First, I must say: I thought about doing some version of the cheesy newspaper title for this review (something like “A shadow hangs over this game”), but I decided to just give you the “straight dope” and just tell you instead of annoying you with headlines that make one roll their eyes. The straight dope is that the game has what I consider a huge flaw.

Before I expound on that design flaw, I feel the need to point out the good things about the game. First, I could be wrong (I haven’t researched it), but I believe it was one of the first games to introduce the traitor element, and it is that traitor element that endears it to most people that like it. Full disclosure: the traitor mechanic does nothing for me, but others would say that it is a good aspect of the game.

In my humble opinion, the best element is the theme. It is implemented by allowing you to play as the knights of the round table, giving you little figurines for your character and everything. The pieces are well made and the artwork is great.

Given that theme, the game looks to be a lot of fun when I first opened the box. However, as I started to play, I found that the mini-games were fun but not great. Another way to say it is that they are not bad, but they are well… meh. Meh is probably the best descriptor if you are familiar with that adjective expressing something’s unexceptional nature.

After playing through the mini-games and finishing the game a few times, I found that the game was extremely difficult. This is where the major design flaw was eventually discovered. I started reading forums on boardgamegeek.com, discussing the difficulty as well as the strategies to beat the game. What I found was that there seems to be one main way to beat the game.

Let me back up for a moment. When you play the game, you move your characters to the mini-games of your choice; so, the order you go to each mini-game is up to you. You can even go back and forth from mini-games, switching even in the middle of playing one of them. So, it seems, at first, that there are a plethora of permutations one could follow to achieve victory.

However, that is not the case. There seems to be one (or maybe two) best sequences to follow. If you follow that sequence, you have a good chance of winning. If you try any other order on those mini-games, you will almost certainly lose. One familiar with strategy games should see the problem here: One does not adapt their strategy much during the game. Moreover, there really is no reason to try different strategies from game to game. Instead, the players just do the same actions in the order every time. One familiar with Shadows Over Camelot might say: “But you add in the traitor, and there is great tension.” That tension does not matter if the team’s strategy must proceed in the same order every play-through in order to have a chance to win.

Sorry, Days Of Wonder, I am willing to try a co-op game with a traitor, but if the strategy is the same every time, that is going to bore me regardless of a traitor. Design a game where my team’s strategy can change as the game progresses (in reaction to the events of that particular session); then get back to me.

Shadows over Camelot is a coop game set in the medieval time of Camelot, King Arthur, and his knights of the round table.

The game starts with the choosing of the different knights each player will play with. Each knight has a special ability that is unique to them makes them better suited for different parts of the game. Along with choosing of the knights each player is given a loyalty card, someone among the group is a traitor!!!! But who? What is their role? And how did this knife get in my back?

Components
Shadows over Camelot comes with several boards with this game, all featuring a different quest that the knights can go on to complete. Set in the theme of Camelot there is a quest for Excalibur, the Holy Grail, fighting a dragon, and a few others.

Game Play
On your turn you have two phases, an evil phase and a good phase. Evil is up first and you can choose from three different actions. You can cause your knight to lose a life point, play a siege engine against Camelot, or draw a black/evil card and perform action the card tells you to do. Drawing a black card will usually have an action that will strengthen an opposing army such as the Sax or move Excalibur against you. These effects are manageable and expected. But be careful! There are other cards, very powerful cards of dark magic and treachery in there that can greatly damage your knights.

As a knight of the round table you are trying to manage these evil effects against Camelot, but as the traitor you are trying to cause the most damage without being caught.

Along with the evil phase there is also a good phase on your turn that will benefit the knights. Through the good phase you can gain a life point, accuse a traitor, move to a quest, or play the also good white cards you will be collecting.

As knights complete different quest they receive the treasure from that quest. The usually consist of life points gained, extra cards into your hand, special goods such as armor or Excalibur itself. But most important are the white swords added to the round table. This is how the game is actually won. If you are able to fill the table with swords and have the majority as white then you are able to win. However, there are multiple ways to lose. Your knight can lose all their life points and die. Camelot can be overcome by siege engines. You can lose also lose too many quest resulting in too many black swards, or “evil influence” in Camelot.

Setting Itself Apart
The thing two things that do set it apart are the quest, I feel like they overcome the “Alpha Gamer” in a way, allowing you to do more you want instead of being managed by one player. The second is the traitor. This can be a lot of fun, but the Pandemic expansion also allows for this somewhat, and it seems the traitor can easily thrash you without much to stop him.

In Conclusion
Overall, this isn’t a game we break out too often. Some of the quest are a little daunting, such as the grail. And for some reason it just doesn’t have that much of a “fun” level. Whenever I lose at Pandemic, I want to get back in there and give it another go. When I lose at Camelot, I’m just like, “Oh, that stinks! What’s next?” It’s not the best coop game I’ve played, but it’s not the worst. It’s nice to breakout once in a while and blow the dust off of.

I won’t delve into the rules, Dolus did a great job, already! However I want to mention a few things..:
This is a fine introductory semi co-op/traitor-involved game and it would appeal to non-gamers or new ones. The gameplay is light, the Arthurian theme is beautiful, the quality of components is excellent (rarely have I seen a game’s plastic insert to take into account the size of [u]sleeved[/u] cards).

In my opinion, the game has a medium replay value (rather simple for my taste). There are some options, though:
a) You could pump it up with the new ‘Days of Wonder’ expansion ‘Merlin’s Company’ which adds new Knights, Merlin himself, new bad guys, and Travel (event) cards.
b) You could consider it as a necessary (learning) step, and get Battlestar Galactica which is a more complicated and heavy semi co-op game.
Personally, I would go straight to Battlestar Galactica