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Originally Posted by cfarrell
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).
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Well, ultimately this is going to an entirely personal call, as to what one person finds evocative and what another doesn't.
But, to explain why I find ShoC more thematic than LotR:
LotR has never risen to be more than a symbolic game for me. You talk about the Friendship track giving you allies and Hiding avoiding Nazgul, and I've really never made that connection. For me it's pretty much a programming exercise:
OK, we're on Board X, we should consider moving up the boots track quickly so that we don't get nailed by event #3 and we should think about moving up the handshake track to get those additional cards before event #2 makes them go away.
Likewise, the cards have never risen above their symbology for me. I barely even see the names & pictures on the cards, because it's the icons that are important, nothing more.
I'll believe you that good choices were made as to what names went with which icons, but the game doesn't draw me in enough to actually see those connections. The game is so much about abstract icons that are very generic and very simple that nothing else becomes apparent.
This is all worsened by the fact that so many of the icons are so abstract that I feel like they have no basis in reality. The icons for the various tracks have perhaps the most basis in real theming, but are still paper-thin to me. What's the wild icon supposed to represent? The power of the Ring? And if so why doesn't it have bad repercussions? White and gray cards, what's that supposed to represent? And the symbols on the event tiles, they're practically a foreign language, not something with a basis in reality (or fantasy, as the case might be).
Mind you, I like the game, I just don't find it thematic.
Contrariwise, I find the thematic/mechanic connection on ShoC much more meaningful. Each of the quests is so unique, that even if they do use abstracted mechanics, you can't help but think about each of them differently. In some ways this makes the game messier, mechanics-wise, but I also think it deepens the theming.
And beyond that, even when ShoC does come down to iconography (fight cards, grail cards, tossing stuff into the lake), it feels much more connected to what's going on than the abstract ideas of LotR.
I also feel like the game is closer to the source material. Running off on all these quests seems quite Arthurian. I suppose the slow, dangerous slog against Middle Earth feels somewhat Tolkienesque, but it also leaves out a lot of the epic aspect of the books.
Admittedly, the components also help. LotR has pretty nice components, but with all its miniatures, ShoC can't help but draw you that much further into the gameworld.
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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.
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I'm a lot more conservant with the Arthurian mythos, given that I've written & published short stories & roleplaying books set in the genre; that probably makes a difference too.
Shannon