Shadows over Camelot: The Card Game
Shadows over Camelot: The Card Game invites you to play the role of sons & daughters of the legendary Knights of the Round Table who unite to defeat... the game itself, represented by a deck of Rumor cards that threaten to overwhelm Camelot.
Listen carefully to these rumors and employ your keen sense of observation and the collective wisdom of the group to decide the right time to embark on Quests and collect 7 White Swords to achieve victory. Collaboration is essential. Like in the eponymous board game, and unlike other more traditional games, you will either all win - or all fail - together in this game.
Alas, perhaps not... There may be a Traitor in your midst, a player who drew the “Traitor” Loyalty card at game start and will work to defeat you all by secretly helping to place 7 Black Swords on the table.
Your goal is to make sure you get 7 White Swords first!
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First, I’ve never played Shadows over Camelot. I do really enjoy playing Battlestar Galactica so I’m familiar with the hidden role/traitor type gameplay. I bought this for my wife because she also enjoys BSG but we don’t own it and don’t have any friends to play it with. My hope was that the card game version would be easy enough to introduce others to playing it and the Arthurian theme would be more approachable than ‘scary sci-fi’.
The mechanisms are very simple. You flip over the top card and add it to the stack. Players have to keep running totals of the numbers displayed in several categories (Pixies, Saxons, Dragons, Grails and Excaliburs). So, in that respect it’s just a memory game. But there’s also the potential (not guaranteed) for a traitor in your midsts. Ever try to remember something when somebody is actively trying to make you mentally trip up? It’s tough. Ok, so it’s card counting (more or less) with the house trying to screw you up by shuffling the deck too early for your count to be worthwhile. Wrong game, same idea. But then it gets harder. Some cards don’t have a number, they have a ? which has a value of 1*number of ? of that type. So, if you have 1 ?, it’s worth 1. If you have 2 ?, they’re each worth 2, so 4 added to the count. Mathematically, add the square of the ? count to the total. Yeah, that’s fun. Now the game screws with you. Morgana comes out and does two mean things. One, players can no longer communicate. Not just ‘no talking’ – no communicating in ANY FORM. And then she screws up the count in some way by adding values or removing values from the total OR she gives the traitor even better ways to screw with the other players. Whether it’s putting cards face down on the stack but announcing what the card was or simply making you count out loud each time you flip a card over it’s becomes insane to keep track of five different running totals.
So why do you do this? When a card appears of a particular type that puts the total up to 11, 12 or 13 you want to go on a quest to earn White Swords. Beware though, if the total is 13 you earn one or many black swords.
Basically, the game is super simple, but there’s so much fun in trying to keep the numbers straight guessing, second guessing and then triple guessing a decision to go on a quest can leave everyone laughing. Until the traitor stabs everyone in the back and they’re the only one laughing.