Today's review is of the 2005 release, Shadows over Camelot. For 3-7 players, it takes 60-90 minutes.
Overview
You are a knight of the Round Table, and there's a problem- all is not well in the land of Arthur. Picts and Saxons gather on the shores, a black knight threatens the outskirts of the realm, excalibur is unclaimed, the holy grail cannot be found, Lancelot's armor is lost, there are rumors of a dragon, and there may even be a traitor in your midst. Can you and your fellow knights stave off these shadows to restore the land?
Shadows over Camelot is a cooperative game- everyone (except the traitor, if one is present) is fighting against the game. After setup, each player in turn order does two actions- one evil and one good:
progression evil: (you must choose one of the following)
- draw a black card and play it (has a bad effect or places a card on one of the quests)
- place a siege engine outside Camelot (you lose if there are 12 outside Camelot)
- lose one life
perform a heroic action: (you must choose one of the following)
- draw two white cards (only if at Camelot)
- fight a siege engine (only if at Camelot)
- move to a new location
- perform a quest action at your current location (generally this means putting down a fight card)
- discard 3 matching white cards to heal one life
- play a special white card
- accuse a knight of being a traitor
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| board and components; image from here |
The game is about completing quests to earn white swords for the Round Table (you win by having a majority white when the twelfth sword is placed). Each quest- against Picts, Saxons, the Black Knight, Holy Grail, etc.- is about playing white cards from your hand(s) based on the quest's requirements. Sometimes you have to play a set of matching fight cards (basic white cards with numerical values), sometimes a run of fight cards, sometimes discard any white card, sometimes play a grail card- depends what quest you're on. You get to lay down only one card each turn, so it will take a while to complete a quest. And the black cards you draw on the 'progression of evil' step will place black cards on different quests (each black card drawn says where it goes), making that quest harder to complete and/or bringing it one step closer to failure. If you win a quest, you get one (or more) white swords for the Table and other benefits. If you lose, you get one (or more) black swords and other bad things happen. So choose your quests wisely!
Example: winning the Pict quest occurs when five fight cards (valued 1-5) are placed before there are four Picts at the location. If you and your team get those cards down first, you win the quest, and all Picts are discarded. You get a white sword for the Round Table, and everyone gains a life, shares some drawn white cards, and goes back to Camelot. But if you fail- if four Picts are placed before you get that run of five cards- all knights at that quest fail. They each lose a life, go back to Camelot, a black sword is placed on the Round Table, and two siege engines are placed outside Camelot. Each quest has different victory and failure conditions and consequences.
An additional wrinkle: the traitor. At the start of the game, each person secretly gets a loyalty card, telling them if they are loyal or not. With eight loyalty cards but only seven players, players don't know if there's a traitor or not (in our game, there wasn't). But if there is, that person is secretly trying to get the knights to fail- which isn't hard to do. The game ends immediately in failure if:
- there are 12 siege engines outside Camelot
- there are 7 black swords on the Round Table
- all loyal knights are dead
Anytime the rules require you to discard a card, it's always done face-down, meaning the traitor could be ditching great cards and nobody will know. So be on the lookout . . .
Review
I liked this game. One of the first cooperative board games, it's a fun experience. The variety of quests is interesting, the black card draws add suspense and urgency, and the cooperative aspect is fun. Placing only one card at a time on the quests can seem maddeningly slow, but that's probably the point (to add suspense and put the outcome in doubt), and does give a sense of accomplishment when one is completed.
In our game, we thought it easy at first (we completed a few key quests and ran up the white sword total easily), but it got really hard at the end. If you draw a black card for a quest that's been completed, a siege engine is placed instead. That means the engines can ramp up quickly once you've completed quests, risking the game and requiring knights to stay behind at Camelot to fight them off as others complete remaining quests. So the game gets harder as you progress- a nice feature. And we didn't even have a traitor- if we did, we surely would have lost.
In the end, I like the variety, suspense, theme (Arthur!), cooperative play, and the ability to include more players (going up to 7 is nice, and unusual for a strategy game). It seems complicated at first, and there is a lot going on, but it gets easy (to understand) fast, and hard (to win)- a good combination.
Rating: A-
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