Keep in mind I’ve never played the game, but I did watch a few videos on YouTube (plus I may have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express at some point). I was at least partially familiar with the rules, and I did read the book (once) before work. Despite that, I did a terrible job of explaining the game and the rules which took way longer than it should have. Ultimately we decided to just dive in and learn the rules as we went.
Shadows Over Camelot (or SoC as it is sometimes written) is a cooperative game with a potential traitor element. It supports up to seven players, each of whom is a Knight of the Round Table. Before the game starts, each player draws a secret loyalty card which indicates if they are Loyal or a Traitor. As I was allowing people to draw cards, I thought that if we had a traitor (it’s not guaranteed) it would be best if it were me, since I had at least seen the game played.
Guess who pulled the traitor card? This guy. 😈
I’ll have a full-blown review of the game at some point in the future. Our session today started out innocently enough. We identified a knight who would be responsible for picking up Excalibur, and another knight was going for the Grail. I was going to face the Black Knight. I managed to defeat the quest, but also managed to burn a few more cards than were necessary to do so. The subtleties of traitor-ship. 🙂 Meanwhile the Grail quest was going extremely poorly, as we pulled so many anti-Grail cards from the black deck that it wasn’t even funny. I didn’t have to help that quest fail at all! My hand started with a lot of “2” Fight cards, which made it harder for the others to complete the combat quests (which require a set of 1-5 Fight cards) since I had so many.
As our lunch time was drawing to a close, I pulled the “Fate” card which allowed me to declare myself as the Traitor and immediately start working to sabotage the efforts of the loyal knights. I taunted the knight who was attempting to hold Grail cards a number of times in an effort to steal the needed Grail cards. I added a few siege engines to Camelot. Ultimately we ran out of time before we could determine a victor. When the game was called due to time, there were two white swords on the table (both placed by me, ironically), nine siege engines, four black cards to zero white cards on the Lancelot quest, and 7 slots on the Grail quest were occupied by black cards! It was not looking good for the loyal knights.
The best indication of the success of the game, however, was the fact that everyone wanted to play it again. Next time we won’t have to learn the rules, so things will start off faster and hopefully we’ll finish. Plus we’ve booked two hours instead of one and a half. 🙂