Suspicion, Blather, and a Sense of Growing Menace

We had seven gamers present the other night at our gaming group. Seven is a difficult number with games. Many of the best middle and heavy weight strategy games play at most five or six players. We ended up playing Shadows over Camelot. This was my first time with this cooperative game.

For those unfamiliar with the game, let me just say that the most important mechanism in the game is the possibility that one of the players is a secret traitor who is trying to sabotage the work of the other players. The greater the number of players, the greater the chance that there will be a traitor in the game.

Camelot draws some extreme reactions from our crowd. Ted thoroughly dislikes it. He claims that each turn fails to provide players with interesting decisions, that the best moves are often obvious. And he claims that the game takes too long and moves too slowly, and that the game’s pace is usually hampered by the enormous amount of find-the-traitor blather that inevitably occurs.

James feels that the find-the-traitor blather is whole the point of the game. He seems to believe that the only way to keep the pace of the game from bogging down completely is to make each player’s turn quick and simple which then allows players to devote most of their time and energy to looking for signs of treason in others. This creates a constant flow of semi-facetious comments whenever a player makes any move that doesn’t immediately benefit the group as a whole.

“That’s the best you could do—traitor!” is a typical remark.

“Hey, I didn’t see you finish that quest on your turn,” the player might reply. “Some might regard your delay as…oh, treason!”

My reaction to the game embraced both Ted and James’s feelings. They are both right.

I agree with Ted that the optimum move in Camelot is often obvious. There frequently aren’t a lot of interesting strategic decisions. And you can spend an awful lot of time waiting for slower players to take their turns while listening to a lot of less-than-witty banter about what each and every player is up to. I can see why a serious gamer could long for meatier fare while playing Camelot.

But even while I was hoping the game moved faster, part of me was intrigued. Playing spot-the-traitor is interesting, particularly because any decent player will give the other players very few clues to work with. The clues are seldom conclusive, and paranoia makes any sub-optimal move seem suspicious. By the end of the game, Ted correctly identified the traitor in our midst, but I was surprised that he could be so certain.

And the whole cooperative thing generates some serious suspense for me. I don’t know why, but the creeping doom mechanisms at the heart of Camelot and Lord of the Rings (the other most famous cooperative game) keep me riveted. Maybe its because we see evil progressing almost every turn, and the games make this progress quite concrete. It’s hard not to feel a sense of menace watching the enemy catapults increase around Camelot, or watching the heavy Sauron marker advance toward the Hobbit heroes in Lord of the Rings.

Maybe the thing to do would be to play Camelot with fewer players. My turn would come around a bit faster, and there would be fewer players participating in the trash talk.

The cooperative genre is one of the more undeveloped genres in gaming. I know that Vanished Planet is a cooperative game (I haven’t played it), and that Republic of Rome blends both cooperative and competitive mechanisms, but I don’t think there are too many other popular mainstream games of this type.

Let’s hope some clever game designers tinker with this genre. Give us some interesting strategic decisions along with the sense of growing menace and the result could be a very popular game.