Shadows Over Camelot is a new board game published by Days of Wonder, written by Serge Laget and Bruno Cathala. Meant for three to seven players, Shadows plays in sixty to eighty minutes and is meant for players age ten and over. Shadows runs for $49.99

In looking at the contents, we have the following: 1 Master game board of Camleot 3 double-sided Quest boards 30 miniatures of the Knights and their foes 168 character, event and loyalty cards 7 Coats of Arms & 8 dice 16 Swords of the Round Table 1 Rules booklet & 1 Book of Quests 1 Days of Wonder Online access number.

Okay, but what does that mean? In terms of miniatures, these are nice resin pieces that are approximately 30mm tall, maybe a bit more but they stand up well next to some of the larger Games Workshop models. The detail on the knights and their foes is well done. For foes, we have four Picts and four Saxons as well as twelve miniature siege engines. For knights, there are seven knights and the interesting thing here, is that the knights have colored bases. The colored bases match their place on the round table as well as the seven six sided dice. We also have three artifacts, the sword Excalibur, Lancelot’s armor, and the Holy Grail.

Outside of their use for the board game, they look fit to be painted for any miniatures game that uses knights and the quest pieces are great for placement of treasure.

What about the cards? They held up well during game play and have some sort of coating. The instruction booklet and the quests booklet could be a little smaller as you have to put them either directly on top of the container or put them under it. It’s easier to put it under as it’s just big enough to slip and lose it’s spot on top, making it hard to close the box. The rest of the container works great though. Slots for the dice, swords, and miniatures insures that the material goes in smooth and fits easily.

Shadows plays far differently than any board game I’ve played before. I had two friends over and we played three games, each game taking around sixty minutes to play. We’re the type of guys who read the instructions once then start playing and then referring to the instructions over the course of the game. I can honestly say that due to our poor reading skills we butchered the first two games but managed to get the last one right.

In that spirit, that’s probably why we lost the first two games and won the third. What’s that, we all lost? Yes. Shadows pits the players against the game itself. The game is almost a thinking entity like a computer game, where events are going on at all levels due to the ‘Progression of Evil’ that starts off every knight’s turn.

See, those different quests that you go on, are going on whether or not someone is there to do them. For those quests, we have the solo challenges like dueling the black knight or fighting Lancelot, as well as potential group quests like finding Excalibur, fighting the dragon, battling the Picts or Saxons or taking out some of the accumulating siege engines.

The game starts with each player randomly selecting one of the knights. For knights, we have the following; Sir Tristan, Sir Gawain, King Arthur, Sir Kay, Sir Percival, Sir Galahad, and Sir Palamedes. Each knight starts off with four life points, has a maximum of six (tracked with the specially colored d6 dice), and has a special power that helps either the knight directly, or potentially works for or against the group. Take Sir Palamedes. For every quest he successfully completes, he gets an additional life point. Sir Percival on the other hand, can look at the top Black card before deciding to draw it, or take another “Progression of Evil”

Each player gets a Merlin card and five white cards. These white cards range from special cards that let you gain health, extra white cards or allow you to trade, to Merlin cards that are useful for a number of things including preventing a standard black card from being put into play, to taking out a siege engine.

Every round starts with two parts. The first is the Progression of Evil that I’ve mentioned. There are three things that the player can do to start the progression. The first is draw a black card and play it. The black cards range from fighting cards for the various quests on the board, to adding Picts or special black cards that can effect the whole game from that point on. The second step is to add a siege engine around Camelot. The third and perhaps least painful is to take a life point.

In terms of fighting cards, there are some potential threats. See, you can play a black card face down and get a white card in exchange. Doing this makes fighting that quest much more uncertain as you now have no idea if you should try and use your best cards or your worst cards. In our three games, we generally put only the really low point values face down to get white cards and played the high cards face up so our fellow knights could see the threat.

Next, the knights can perform a heroic action. This includes moving to a new quest, performing the quest’s heroic action, playing a special white card, discard three identical cards to gain one life point, or accuse 1 knight of being the traitor.

That’s right, a traitor can be in the game. In addition to the white cards, each knight gets a loyalty card face down and of the eight cards, one of them is a traitor. This means that not every game will have a traitor in it and for our three games, to get the hang of the mechanics, we didn’t use the traitor cards. This is an interesting part of the game though, as it makes certain knights abilities more devastating to the game as one knight’s special ability is to draw two black cards and play one for example. The player could always pick the worst card and it’s effects.

In terms of heroic actions, the game moves quickly. Some of the quests are multi-player like rescuing Excalibur or the Grail. In that case, the players go to the area and start playing their cards until the quest is either won or lost. If all players leave the quest, all cards played until that point are lost. That was one of the things we didn’t get the first two games we played and it added another level of “Man, this game has levels within levels to it.”

I say that because the black cards don’t have that problem. If you draw fight cards for the black knight for example, and fill out his attack grid and there’s no one there to face him, he automatically wins.

In terms of the quests, you generally gain a set number of white swords, life, and white cards. If you lose, you gain swords, but now those swords are black, and you lose life points. In addition, once certain quests are done, they become dangers to the game because at that point, every time you draw a card that would advance that quest, you now place a siege engine down.

So how does one win the game? If thee are 12 or more swords on the round table and a majority of them are white, “you”, meaning the good knights, win.

How does one lose? Well, if there are ever 12 siege engines around Camelot, you lose. If there are ever seven black swords on the round table, you lose. Or if all knights, except the traitor, are dead, you lose.

This is where the fun comes in. See, because the game is always advancing towards evil, you have to work as a team to win. You want to get those swords down as soon as possible but to do that, you need cards to continue so you have to quest or stay at Camelot and use your turn to draw cards.

In our first game, I didn’t see the danger in adding siege engines around Camelot instead of taking life damage or drawing black cards. That was a mistake because as soon as the grail quest was completed, every card that slowed down progression of the grail quest, added a siege engine and we lost through that.

In our second game, we beat the grail quest and the Excalibur quest, and once again, siege engines proved our downfall. Like the grail quest, the Excalibur quest has cards that hinder your progression and once done, they also add siege engines every time they’re pulled.

In our third game however, we took more life damage, preventing siege engines and black cards from being drawn, and cleaned out some of the smaller of the smaller quests to get the swords on the table. We figured out that as soon as we had seven white swords, that even if we lost some quests that it was better than trying to get everything done. That worked for us because we were playing without a traitor knight. If you are playing with a traitor and make an accusation that proves false, you turn a white sword over to black.

Another interesting aspect of this game is that combat is resolved almost entirely through cards. For example, when fighting the black knight, the black knight has four slots and you have two sets of slots. The black knight can only gain cards through the Progression phase when a black card matches the black knight slot. Each card has a point value associated with it. On your side, you have to put down two different suites of cards. Once one side is filled, either the white or black, the duel happens. Points are compared so this means that if you started off with two ones and two twos and managed to get there and fill the slots before a single card was pulled for the black knight, you win with a minimum of fuss.

On the other hand, fighting the Saxons or Picts requires you to place cards down from one to five in increasing order. Good thing that’s a multiple person quest. How does the enemy win? If you pull four black cards that give that faction a miniature, they win and you lose.

The thing about the game though, is any black card played goes into effect immediately unless cancelled by a Merlin (or in the case of special black cards, three Merlin cards.) This means that at any time, Saxons can be storming the beech as the black knight insults your honor and the sword Excalibur threatens to be lost forever. Evil wins even if you’re not there to oppose it as more black swords are added to the round table.

Combine this with the innovation of being a cooperative game, and you’ve got some great elements with a high replayability factor. Even the three prizes don’t make the game very opposition based, as despite having some ‘coolness’ factor to them, they’re not that powerful. Why fight over who gets Excalibur when it only adds +1 to your combat value? Why bicker when the Holy Grail can only be used to heal a dying knight once and is then lost? The real danger in those cards though, is the traitor factor. For example, if you have a traitor in your midst that gets Lancelot’s Armor, he can draw two black cards and play the worse of the two.

There are a very few minor things I’d like to see changed or added. I’d like to see the items do different things for different characters. All three relics do exactly the same thing for each knight, regardless of that knight’s origin of abilities. Makes sense but I’d like some ‘advanced’ options if you will. In addition, despite there being seven knights to randomly get, when we played, we wound up playing the same knights twice out of three games and given the very rich history of Arthurian knights available, I’d like to see even more knights added to the game. In that vein though, there is already a free download of a new knight that was given away in a recent Game Trader magazine with a free miniature.

Those aren’t even complaints, more like a wish list. The game is fun and in looking at it, it looks like one of the few games that would actually play much better with more players. Some games get bogged down in the player versus player action, especially when you’ve got a couple of good players able to cancel each other’s movements and abilities. With more players you can potentially complete quests quicker and thus end the game quicker, but at the same time, since the ‘Progression of Evil’ starts every knight’s turn, you can potentially lose much quicker too. Add in the random threat of a traitor knight, and you’ve got some great elements waiting to be played out in Camelot.

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In 3 reviews, average style rating is 4.33 and average substance rating is 5.00.