Gaming: Shadows Over Camelot

Wow, this game is amazing! Really, it's just a very good idea. The basics is that you play a knight of the round table and do quest and try to finish them before evil does. But this game is a collaboration game, if you win, all of the players win, if you lose, all of you lose... Unless there is a traitor in your midst.

So how can you lose? Well every time it's your turn to play, you need to play evil. So you can pick up an evil card which can count for a quest or just about anything that can hurt you. Or you could play a Siege Weapon (catapult), if you have twelve on the board you lose. Or if you can, take a hit (reduce your health by one) so that evil does not play this turn. Using this system, the game actually scales up depending on the number of players. Very nice.

The way of winning this game is to finish quests which gives you white swords to put on the round table. But the game can win quests too and add black swords to the table, so it's a race between the game and you to finish quests.



At the start you must chose a knight by random, each knight has a special ability. We debated on it yesterday and we believe that every knight has a good ability, there is no "Aw crap, I got Sir Tristan, he sucks bad". You then pick a Loyalty card. Loyalty cards adds another dimension to the game, you don't need to use them and at first I recommend not using them since it's a bit harder. Using them adds the chance of one player becoming a traitor, his job is to make you lose the game. The thing is, these cards are kept secret, so nobody knows who's the traitor. You can denounce a player as the traitor, if you are right, you move that much closer to winning but then the traitor can really start making trouble as each turn he can randomly choose a white card from a player and discard it. If you denounce a loyal player, then depending on how the quest are doing, it can do minimal damage (you lose a turn by your false acquisition) or bad (one white sword is turned black).

Trust me, adding the possibility of a traitor really changes the dynamics of the game. When we added them, there was a lot more mistrust between the players. It was great.

I would recommend this game to anyone who loves strategic games. You would not think that this game would have a lot of strategy, but if you don't go with a plan, you'll get screwed real fast!

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Shadows Over Camelot