For the first time ever, I tried to play Shadows over Camelot with the addition of the loyalty cards yesterday. It was a four-player game, so the presence of a traitor would have been pretty devastating. As it turns out, however, we kept everything under control and we were all loyal.

Also, as it turns out, everyone playing was a seasoned gamer, so there would have been no mistaking inept play for rank treachery. Perhaps I am exaggerating this fear.

It seems to me like the traitor is really strong. In a four-player game, the traitor wouldn’t even have to be subtle–just waste time and put a catapult out every turn. Eventually the knights will have to waste a bunch of time and resources to stall the catapults, and while they do that they’re still drawing black cards or losing life. When 6 swords come out, it’s even worse, because the loyal knights have to accuse the traitor (or else he’ll accuse one of them and turns a white sword black) and then he’ll be stealing their cards as well. The one white sword for the successful accusation doesn’t seem to be even remotely worth it.

I think the traitor doesn’t gain much by trying to fake loyalty, unless things are going bad far enough that the two-white-swords-turn-black effect at the end is enough to tip the balance for evil.

I’d like to try a four-hand game with a known traitor–announced beforehand to see if the good guys even have a chance, because intuitively it looks really bad right now. If it’s as bad as it looks, I would have some proposed changes. First, the successful accusation could be worth more than one sword, or it could turn a black sword white; second, you could delay the choice of loyalty cards until a certain number of swords have been placed. (The three-player game already does this, for six swords; you could subtract, say, an extra sword or two for every player above three.)

In other news, now that daylight savings time has actually ended, I need to finish writing my articles by midnight proper, not 1 the next morning, to have them count for the previous day. Oops.