Shadows Over Camelot Board Game Review

Shadows Over Camelot

By DAYS OF WONDER

For 3-7 players

Play time 1.5 hrs

Setup time 10 mins

Teaching time 15 mins

Shadows over Camelot is a cooperative board game with a traitor element in-built if you so wish to add this to the game. It spices things up considerably but I cannot comment on this much because I have only tried the purely coop version and that already rocks.

This game kinda got me hooked on to board games. It is full of theme and simple to teach. When a friend of mine suggested we spend the night playing Shadows over Camelot, I wasn't enthusiastic. Board games to me meant monopoly, chess or scrabble - games that were plain and bland and simply a way to kill time, not that these games weren't good, but you can tell when a board game has the ability to imerse you into an adventure and a story, and when it is just plain do this, get that and you win. So I just went along with it and boy was I in for a surprise.

The theme of Shadows over Camelot brings you to the story of King Arthur and the knights of the round table. Sir Lancelot has just deserted the king and the forces of evil are going against the kingdom of Camelot. Players each play as one of the courageous knights who will travel to the outskirts of Camelot to complete tasks and attain white swords and rid the evil shadow that is looming over Camelot.

Game components 9/10
Miniatures.. Lots and lots of miniatures.. Oh joy.. And colored too though not pre-painted.. I like the components.. The boards are creative with beautiful pictures of Camelot and it's various tasks to accomplish. There are quite a few boards and some even double sided to expand on the tasks. Cards are sturdy and will last a couple runs.

Game Mechanics 7/10
It feels a bit like a poker or solitaire game though not totally. I will not go through every task that you will be attempting. I will simply go through the basic turn-phase.

Setup will consist of everyone receiving their cards in hand including a Merlin card which gives the player/players some abilities to cancel bad events later in the game. Then everyone gets a 6-sided die placed on its side to denote the player's life point value. Everyone chooses the knight they wish to be and grabs their specific knight miniature and places it at the round table of Camelot. Then the first player turn begins.

Each player's turn consists of 2 things - one heroic progression and one evil progression (we like to call them the good thing and the bad thing).

A good thing you may do on your turn may be only one of the following:

• Movement to Camelot or to any quest on the boards
• Placing a card down to progress a certain quest
• If you are in Camelot, you can
• Draw 2 white cards or
• Choose to fight siege durgeons (I hope I got the spelling right)
• Play a special ability card
• Discard 3 cards of the same number from your hand to gain a life point

Then after your heroic action, you have to now choose which of evil moves forward. You may do one of the following:

• Add a siege durgeon to the board
• Draw a black card and resolve it
• Lose a life (how heroically sacrificial this is =.=")

Quests are resolved by placing the correct number of cards and with the right numbers onto the quest itself. The holy grail quests is the exception where you have to place Grail cards there to complete it. As the progression of evil goes, they get to place a card also. This usually happens every time you draw a black card. Complete a quest and you get to gain white swords plus some rewards listed. Lose a quest to evil and you gain black swords plus some negative effects listed.

To win the game, you must collect a number of white swords more than the number of black swords once the round table is filled with swords.

To lose the game, well:

• Forced to place the last siege durgeon on the board
• All the knights' life point reaches zero
• The number of black swords on the table is more than half the number of swords that can be placed on the table

So as you can see here, the game is very difficult. The only way to tweak the difficulty of the game is to add or reduce life points.

Replayability 3/10 (without traitor)

If you do not play with the "traitor" component, then replayability may be quite low after you've defeated the game. Our group played twice and defeated the game. We played one more time just to see if the game would get any easier and yes it did. However, like I mentioned at the beginning, we have not had the chance to try with the traitor component. I believe the replayability value will skyrocket once we have (according to what I've heard). This makes the difficulty level of the game increase significantly so the challenge will definitely be there.

Game Experience 8/10

This was the first Euro game of its kind that I played and it got me hooked to the world of board gaming. So believe it or not, this game gave me an experience of a lifetime. The adrenaline pumping into me as we watched our quests being taken over by evil, and as we won quest after quest, we breathed a sigh of relief and high-fived one another. I truly felt as if I am a heroic knight trying to save Camelot from destruction.

Some things that I found disappointing about the game was that you can only do one thing every turn. Play with 7 players and that one thing that you do counts because you are going to have a super-downtime once you're done with your turn. This makes every turn even longer if some players only wait for their turn before starting to decide what they should do. Moving from one place to another is considered a good thing (What? You mean I move and I end my turn there?). Cards do not come easy because you have to use a turn to draw cards as well. So we feel very limited in our actions, unlike Pandemic where you can strategize and do 4 actions. Decision making is minimal for your good turn but maximum when you decide which bad thing you wish to do. Nobody wants to do a bad thing, but you're forced to do it.

My marks for experience is raised due to the fact that during every turn, there is communication going on among all the players. I love socializing and team work and Shadows over Camelot provides this experience with a very simplistic game play. This helps non-gamers and casual gamers to join in on the fun as well. 

Unfortunately, for every coop game that we have come across, it does suffer from the Alpha gamer syndrome. Typically, one player (a heavy gamer usually) will control everyone's decisions making everyone obey his commands as he strategizes for everyone.  If you are playing board games with people, a good thing to keep in mind is that teamwork comes from the team itself. Let your team make their own decisions and give their opinions even though you may not approve of their lack of thought in their decisions (Sarcasm, totally). It is good to mention that this has not yet happened in our gaming groups. Our main goal when playing is not to win or not, but it is the experience itself teaming up with others and to see how far we can go as a team. If we have a player trying to make decisions for everyone, we will definitely ask him/her to calm down and allow everyone to play as they wish, even though if it means making some losing choices.

Overall 8/10

I love love love coop games. And Shadows over Camelot is the culprit for that. I can't wait for the next session where we can add the traitor in. Awesome experience, awesome teamwork, awesome memories.

Pros:

Awesome experience

Awesome team work

Awesome memories

Cons:

Alpha gamer syndrome

Limited actions per turn


What did you think of the game? Leave me a comment on your opinion of it...