Shadows over Camelot

Wow, I can't get this game out of my head. A board game, even.

The name is "Shadows over Camelot." We played it last night. It's 3-7 players. We played a first half game to learn the rules, and then a second full game.

Now, first, it's a cooperative game. Mostly. Instead of trying to beat one another, you are trying to help each other beat the game.

You start out by giving out characters. King Arthur is mandatory, and then you have knights like Sir Kay, Sir Galahad, Sir Palamedes, and others. They have a certain special thing they can do, but otherwise they're all the same.

The game board is set up with the start place being Camelot and besides that a lot of different locations where one can perform quests. There's fighting the Picts, fighting the Saxons, jousting with the Black Knights, seeking Excalibur, seeking the Holy Grail, seeking Lancelot's armor, and defeating the dragon. With all of these, you have to play certain cards in order to win, sometimes while trying to counter bad cards that come up (I'll explain that shortly). If you win, you get white swords of allegiance put around the round table, gain life and cards, the special item (if you're seeking one) and all is well. If you lose, then black swords and other bad stuff happen.

So all this sounds simple... until you hear what happens on your turn. There are two portions. The first is the dark portion. Either you draw a bad card, you lose one life point, or you put a catapult in front of Camelot. The bad cards often thwart progress on a quest, make people lose good cards, or things like that. Adding one catapult is fine, but they build up, and if twelve catapults are out at once, the game is over; anyone staying in Camelot must try to fight them using cards from their hand and a die roll. Losing a life point hurts, because you start with only four.

Then the second part is where you either move to a quest, play a card to aid a quest, or if in Camelot, draw two cards.

Alright, so the point is to cooperate to complete quests. This is fine, but you must account for an imbalance where one of you might be a traitor. Before the game starts each person gets a loyalty card, which they cannot reveal unless they are accused. An incorrect accusation costs a lot though, so a good traitor can subtly thwart people's plans and sow distrust so that they either accuse the wrong people or are afraid to accuse at all.

Luckily, in the second game we played none of us were the traitor, because it ran close. I was Sir Kay, constantly fighting the Black Knights. Others were only able to thwart bad cards from overtaking the grail quest, Duncan got Lancelot's armor, I got Excalibur by a fluke (played a card to get it so Phil could go back and hit catapults. The situation was actually getting pretty dire, with 10 and 11 catapults consistently, as well as terrible bad cards. Finally, King Arthur (played by Bo) had to sacrifice himself so that we could win the game. So it was bittersweet, but we won by the skin of our teeth.

I'm not sure how much sense that made... but I had fun. It's not something I want to play too often (takes a while to get going in the game, as Leslie observed, and about 60-90 minutes to play), but it's a very friendly game. And it's King Arthur!