Players: 3-6
Time: 5-30 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Camelot comes with a pretty average set of components:
- 1 gameboard
- many cardboard pieces
- 1 rulebook
Gameboard: A small, four-panel board printed on thick cardboard with a gloss finish. It shows computer-generated forests, mountains, and lakes on a hexagonal grid. It's utilitarian, but not beautiful.
Cardboard Pieces: All of the playing pieces in the game are thick, cardboard hexes, full color on one side.
Each player gets 19 hexes: fifteen characters, three spells, and one entry hex in one of the player colors (yellow, gray, green, white, red, or blue). The characters all have cute cartoon artwork and show the main stats for the character: attack, defense, and move. The spells just list the spell name. These are really the heart of what you're using for gameplay, and they're unfortunately missing useful text. The characters really should have included the ranges of their attacks, while the spells should have listed what they do. Particularly in a real-time game where each player has to fend for themselves, these are crucial.
In the regular game you're questing for Excalibur. In game variants you're either trying to collect the accoutrements of kingship or else to collect a certain amount of gold. These are all represented by cardboard hexes as well.
There are also three larger hexes. Two are turn markers, and the third is an explanation of what all the icons on the characters mean. Why there weren't six of the latter, I dunno, because there were a ton of blank hexes that could have been used for this.
Rulebook: A four-page black and white rulebook. The rules are a little scattered, and leave out one important rule: you can't move across forests or mountains.
Arthurian Mythology: I've reviewed a number of Arthurian games lately, and have discussed how true each was to its theming. Here, the theming is very weak. You're trying to grab a sword called Excalibur, and you do have pieces called Arthur, Merlin, Morgan, Lancelot, and Galahad, but there's no real depth in the background. (If anything, the background is presented as satirical Arthuriana, and the humor does work.)
Overall, the components are sturdy and somewhat attractive. They include most, but not quite all, of the information that you need to easily play the game. As such they earn an average "3" ou t of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Camelot is for your Arthur to grab Excalibur and carry it home. One of your Arthurs that is, because you have five of them. And each other player does too.
Setup: The board is laid out and Excalibur is placed near the center. Each player takes a set of eighteen tokens: five Arthurs, four Galahads, four Lancelots, one Merlin, one Morgan, and three magic spells (Teleport, Fireball, and Death Touch).
The players all put their Entry hexes on the board, spread out from each other. Two players are given Turn Tokens. And then play begins!
The Lightning Game System: The core of the game is the Lightning Game System. And it works very simply: you get to take a turn when you're holding on to a Turn Token. When you're done, you pass it clockwise to the next person without a Turn Token. It's very simple, but the result is that if you go to slow you'll get left behind because the other Turn Token will keep going past you. So everyone is encouraged to play very quickly, which results in a totally different type of gameplay from just about any other game that you've played.
Order of Play: During your turn you have three different phases:
- Declare Attacks
- Move
- Attack
Declare Attacks: You start a turn by declaring any pieces that you're going to attack. This freezes those pieces so that they can't move until your attack is done, taking any race conditions out of the game.
Move: Next you can move up to two of your pieces. All of the pieces can move one space except the Arthurs who can move two--unless they're carry Excalibur, which is a big, weighty sword that slows the poor lad down. You can move a piece onto the board through your entry space, which doesn't cost any movement points.
You can't move through mountains, forests, water, or other pieces (meaning that blocking is a viable strategy).
If your piece is in combat with another piece, you can't move away from that piece unless your opponent allows you to disengage, which won't usually happen.
Teleport. Merlin has a one-use spell which lets him teleport anywhere on the board.
Attack: Any piece adjacent to an enemy can attack--not just the two pieces that you moved. To attack you count up the attack value of all attackers, and if it's greater than the defense value of the defender you kill him. Arthurs go back to their owner, while everyone else goes out of play. However if someone is killed in sight of Morgan, she can save that piece, and you instead put it back into your counter set.
You can also ask an opponent for help if they're adjacent to a piece you want to attack, in which case they can add their value to the attack.
The different pieces have different combat values:
- Arthur. Attack 1, Range 1, Defend 1.
- Lancelot. Attack 2, Range 1, Defend 2.
- Galahad. Attack 1, Range 3, Defend 1.
- Merlin. Attack 1, Range 3, Defend 1.
- Morgan. Attack 1, Range 2, Defend 1.
Note that some of these attacks have range. For them Line of Sight is calculated, with mountains and forests potentially blocking Line of Sight. It's a bit of a pain to figure out in a real-time game.
There's also two combat related spells.
Death Touch. A one-use Attack 3, Range 1 spell for Morgan.
Fireball. A one-use Attack 2, Range 3 spell for Merlin.
Timing Issues: The game overall deals well with timing issues. I already mentioned the way that pieces are frozen if you're planning to attack them. This is actually done by touch. You touch a piece if you're going to attack it, but if its owner touched it first to move it, they get to move the piece first. Simple, but elegant. There's also a rule that says you can call "timeout" if there's a rules question or a LOS question.
Sometimes the Turn Tokens can be a little wonky, as you realize you're handing one to someone just as they're handing the other one away, but overall it works well and is quite an elegant gameplay mechanism.
Relationships to Other Games
Tom Jolly's Camelot has been described as a real-time wargame and that's a pretty accurate definition, with the understanding that it's quite a simple wargame. However I'd personally say that Tom Jolly has created a video game that plays at the tabletop, because that's what it feels like to me. The gameplay is frenetic and constant, and if there's any downtime at all, it's spent quickly learning what the other players are doing, before it comes your turn to play again.
Tom Jolly has designed one other real-time game, Light Speed, though it's my understanding that the real-time aspect was actually introduced by his co-designer, James Ernest. I liked that one too.
The Game Design
There's not a lot to say about the wargame element of Camelot. It's very basic. The system works because of your ability to stay in a duel with another person while you bring other forces to bear. There's some strategy here, as you try and maneuver around.
Where the game really shines, however, is in the real-time aspect. It's innovative, it's interesting, and it's what makes the game entirely exciting and fun. It keeps things going in a way that just about no other game does, and it gives the whole thing an almost addictive quality. You finish the game and you immediately want to play again.
The real-time aspect also allows for organic and interesting player interactions. In one of our games two players got into a pointless war with each other while the third player ran away with Excalibur (and I was unable to stop him). I just shook my head. As things very quickly evolve alliances and annoyances occur in a rapid-fire manner that you wouldn't usually see in board games.
There were two elements of the game that didn't seem to work entirely well with the real-time concept. The first was the range 3 Line of Sight issues, which are a bit hard to calculate quickly, and I'm sure we were way too liberal with them in our game. The second was Morgan, whose resurrection ability is pretty hard to keep track of in real-time (and note, again, it's a Line of Sight issue). Neither of these were game breakers, but they did seem like a bad match for the game speed.
On the whole I was entirely impressed with Camelot, and even as I write this I want to play it again. I give it a very high "4" out of "5" for Substance, and it would have reached a full "5" out of "5" if not for some of the real-time/LoS discrepencies I mention.
Conclusion
Tom Jolly's Camelot is a great and highly recommended board game. However, be aware that it's real time and moves very fast, and thus it's going to be more frenetic and less strategic than a lot of board game fare. If that doesn't scare you off, however, I suggest immediately picking the game up.
