I recently had the opportunity to play a couple of games of Shadows Over Camelot (at Dr. Stidd's birthday party in early November). My best man Tom has been telling me to play the game for probably a year, and now having played it I can see why. It's the rare boardgame that's (mostly) collaborative for the players. You're not playing against them so much as against the game itself. (And Tom knows that when I was heavy into video games in the later '90s it was for collaboration against computer AI.) And it's a very very tight game, very nicely balanced. You quickly get some white swords onto the Round Table, and there are only a couple of siege engines out, and you're thinking it's going to be a rout. But damn if the game doesn't manage to create tension and then maintain it all the way to the end. I liked it a lot.

Well, what I've heard is that at some point in 2004, Days of Wonder decided to move the game's release date to 2005, to give it more playtesting and development time. And damn, if that story is true, after playing it, I'd pay ca$h for a prototype from the game session that drove the decision to delay the game. Just for the opportunity to experience the hitches behind the decision and mentally walk my way through the same design insights that solved them.