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Originally Posted by ShannonA
Ironically, I find Shadows much more thematic than the comparitively dry LotR which feels almost entirely abstract.
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Can you elaborate on this a bit? I've heard that from a number of folks and I just can't get my head around it (I'm not saying it's wrong, just that try as I might, I can't see it that way). In Shadows of Camelot, you've got either poker hands to defeat the Black Knight/Lancelot/Picts/etc., or you have simple tracks, and the rewards/penalties for quest success/failure are largely the same for the majority of the quests. In Lord of the Rings, you've got quests with tracks that actually have some thematic flavor and payoff (Gimli advances you on Fighting, moving along the Friendship track gets you Allies, Hiding avoids Nazgul, etc). The events are more varied (Gollum), with a much wider variety of rewards and penalties that make some thematic sense. Sure, the underlying game is still fairly abstract, but a fair amount of effort went into making sure the trappings work. Under the hood, Lord of the Rings and Shadows over Camelot are almost twins. But it seems to me a lot more effort went into Lord of the Ring's superstructure (not to mix metaphors).
If you played Lord of the Rings the boardgame having no exposure to the books, you'd probably come away with some idea what the books are about. The same can't be said of Shadows over Camelot.
And I should say too that I wish that Shadows over Camelot had come with an overview section, similar to what Lord of the Rings had, which had a plot summary of the legend. I'm certainly not ignorant of the stories (I got 9/10 on their BGG giveaway quiz), but I still felt like I didn't know what was going on with the boardgame most of the time and would have appreciated a summary.