Super Camelot
Super Camelot is a fantasy tile game designed by Aron Murch, Thomas M. Gofton, and Josh Derksen, developed by Lynnvander Studios and published by Catalyst Game Labs.
By Aaron T. Huss
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Super Camelot is one of those games that falls into a trend that we’ve seen become quite popular in the past several years – retro graphics in new packages. Super Camelot is a standalone, tile-placement game that looks and feels an awful lot like Legend of Zelda from our days on the Nintendo. It’s not Zelda though, in fact it utilizes the King Arthur legend for its characters, but the premises is essentially like Zelda.
Super Camelot is made for 2-4 players. Each player chooses a character with each one playing the same but containing a couple special tricks that makes that character unique. That uniqueness is effectively a representation of what the character’s “class” is without actually calling it a character class (think ranger, fighter, wizard, etc.). Each character’s goal is to collect enough gems first to win or collect all the relics and get back to win the game. That part is not the retro feel and is more like a mechanic you would find on board games throughout the past couple decades. The retro feel comes from the tile playing and resolution.
Each tile is like moving from screen to screen in Zelda. Move onto the tile, populate your adversaries, and fight your way through. You can kill the enemies, chop down bushes, break rocks, and collect treasures. When you leave the tile and come back, the tile refreshes for all items that are allowed to refresh (sound Nintendo familiar?). Each player can go their separate ways or traverse the same tiles and when your turn is up, the enemies that can attack do so. You thus have to fight your way from screen to screen… I mean tile to gather the items and win the game!
But the coolness of the game doesn’t stop there. The characters are all represented by a cardboard cut-out with a stand. Bushes are made from a pair of cut-outs and stand-up on the tiles. And each and every single piece in the game is beautifully rendered in the 8-bit look! Aah… this game brings back some fun memories of my days playing the Nintendo.
Was it fun? It sure was! I was even able to teach my young girls (5, 7, and 10) how to play. Although there are a couple things I didn’t like. First, the font on the character cards can get difficult to read at times. Second, the Dark Knight enemies need stands as they are too big for the squares they are supposed to fit into on the tiles. They would also look better with stands anyway.
Other than that I really enjoyed the game and can see taking the mechanics and skinning it with something different. You could even do different genres, but it might not be quite the same. Firearms would probably need a couple mechanical tweaks… but it’s still very fun and I love the retro look and feel!
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