Shadows Over Camelot

Shadows Over Camelot is a game I found while browsing a list of board games on wikipedia and thought sounded interesting. From what I have seen, the game doesn't look like it would be terribly difficult if you had the board in front of you while reading an explanation.

The game is basically the Knights of the Round Table (the people you are playing as) trying to defend Camelot. They do this by taking their turns and trying to help win. At the beginning of your turn, you must suffer a "progression of evil" and either lose health, add a siege engine to the ones attacking Camelot, or draw a black card that will make quests harder to complete. After that, you take a heroic action. A heroic action is when you move to or return from a quest location, advancing a quest towards victory, playing a special white card, discarding three of the same cards to gain health, or accuse another knight of being the traitor. The traitor is a possibility in the game where, at the beginning, everyone is dealt loyalty cards. There are seven loyal cards and one traitor card, and there can only be a maximum of seven people, meaning there won't always be a traitor every match. You can also lose one health to do another heroic action during your turn. Quests are completed by having the right cards, and completed quests reward white swords to the table. The way to win is to have more white swords than black on the table by the time it fills up. Black swords are a result of failed quests, failed accusations of the traitor (one white sword turns black), and if the traitor is still there at the end (two white swords turn black). Another way to lose, however, is if twelve siege engines surround the castle.

This game seems similar to Arkham Horror in the fact that there are many ways to lose, and a very hard to achieve way to win. That's not always a bad thing though, because I think that way when you win you feel more accomplished because you just beat an extremely hard game.