Rowan Tree and Red Thread

I got to play Shadows Over Camelot on Sunday with A (alaimacerc), K, R, M and U. We were at K's place, and sammywol stayed home to mind our daughter. I felt guilty about that, despite her outing "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" the previous Sunday.

Shadows Over Camelot is a collaborative game where all the players, as knights, attempt to achieve various quests and populate the Round Table with a majority of white sword tokens by game end. One player may be a traitor who works covertly to stymie the others. The board and pieces are gorgeous, and the rounds are usually pretty quick once you get the hang of things. The rules explanation was quite long and disjoint, unfortunately, as is usually the case with a new game, and A, M and U didn't arrive at anything like 2.30, the proposed start-time, so we started late.

We didn't really understand the implications of various rules and quests and so started off into a bunch simultaneously without adequate preparation. We should probably have hung around Camelot a bit first to gather cards and to see how the various quests were shaping up. I think the game play is interesting enough, though it's always a problem for me when players can be knocked out and be left with nothing to do, as R and M were. U won handily as the traitorous King Arthur. A was adamant that we should have played without the traitor for our first game, as the rules suggest. He's probably right insomuch as we would have had more of a chance of finding our feet and tackling the mounting problems facing Camelot. I think it would have been more boring, however, and certainly a lot longer. As it was we finished up round 5.30, three hours after the original start time, so I was glad enough to get home to sammywol and relieve her of some of the stress of handling a sick daughter.

Verdict: interesting collaborative game that needs another play or two to firm up my feelings about it. Probably better with more over-acting and role-playing thrown in for fun.