Game Preview: Merlin’s Company / Memoir ‘44 Campaign Bag

By W. Eric Martin
April 18, 2008

Publisher: Days of Wonder
Designers: Serge Laget & Bruno Cathala
Players: 3-8
Release Date: June in Europe, July in North America
Price: €25 / $25

Editor’s note: I bumped this preview to show off the new pics from Merlin’s Company. Enjoy!

Fresh on the heels of Ticket to Ride: The Card Game, Days of Wonder has announced two new items for Summer 2008, both of which build on existing games. The first item is Merlin’s Company, an expansion for the semi-cooperative game Shadows Over Camelot that allows up to two traitors to work against the forces of Camelot when playing with seven or eight players.

Players also get to experiment with the forces of good since Merlin’s Company includes a figure of Sir Bedivere (previously available only as a promotional figure) as well as seven new Coat of Arm cards representing new knights that can be swapped in for those in the original game. (The Coat of Arm and colored die are included for Sir Bedivere as well.) King Arthur, however, must take part in each game – he is the King, after all!

The other components in the expansion include a new deck of loyalty cards (so that second traitor card won’t stand out in your current deck), 23 white cards (including eight with new special actions), 14 black cards (with seven new ones to represent the witches who allied with Morgan le Fay), and 16 travel cards.

The travel cards come into play whenever a knight travels from Camelot to a quest, or from quest to quest. The player first declares where she intends to travel, then draws a card from the deck. The action might succeed without trouble, the knight might become enthralled by the Grail and travel to the Grail quest instead of where she wanted, the knight might be captured or ambushed – or Merlin could make a surprise appearance and accompany the knight to her quest, even a solo one. If Merlin stands by your side on a quest, then you can draw an additional white card as a free action.

Merlin sticks around on a quest even after it’s completed – powerful archmages don’t teleport to Camelot against their will – and if a black card is drawn for a completed quest where Merlin still stands, such as Excalibur or the Holy Grail, then the black card is discarded without a siege engine being added outside the walls of Camelot. In general, black cards for completed quests are removed from the game rather than placed in the discard pile, but they still add a siege engine to the board unless Merlin is around to protect you.

One person who played the expansion noted that despite the perks of the new white cards and Merlin’s aid, the game is now much harder, “on the level of what Friends & Foes did for Lord of the Rings.” The witch cards account for much of the nastiness, with one witch causing all knights who aren’t present on a lost quest to lose 1 life point and another causing Merlin cards to be removed from the game whenever played. Life is precious!

Thankfully the traitors won’t have the chance to communicate, other than through possibly dubious actions on the board, as they get to turn three swords from white to black if they go undiscovered. Keep a sharp eye out for treachery as that’s a huge swing to overcome at game’s end.

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Publisher: Days of Wonder
Designer: Richard Borg
Players: 2
Release Date: June
Price: $40 / €40

In 2006, while covering the GAMA Trade Show, Rick Thornquist heard about a “special big Memoir ‘44 thing,” to use his mysterious description. By April of that year, the item had been revealed:  a carrying case to haul all your Memoir ‘44 goodies. The carrying case would include an Air Pack with sortie rules and an updated summary card deck.

Then time passed, and the carrying case disappeared from the radar. The Air Pack graduated to an expansion of its own, released with an overhauled book of scenarios at the end of 2007, but the carrying case that was to birth the Air Pack remained in hiding. Was it the camo that made it hard to spot?

Whatever the circumstances, the Memoir ‘44 Carrying Bag is now set to appear in June 2008, carrying a new addition to the Memoir line: a large-scale, ready-to-play battle map called “Breakthrough to Gembloux.” (And no, Memoir has not merged with an abstract strategy game that assaults American troops with giant gem formations.)

The Memoir ‘44 Carrying Bag, a 17x14x8 “olive-drab” canvas bag, will hold two sets of the base game, as well as all of the current expansions.

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Comments:

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Merlin’s Company is the unnamed expansion that many of us played in Columbus - now that it’s been announced, I suppose I can dish a little. Superb expansion to the base game.  DoW has resisted the temptation to toss even more chrome into the game and kept the expansion relatively lean.  That doesn’t mean you don’t get lots of new gameplay - the changes actually do very much rework the game - but you don’t need to wade through another big rulebook and you don’t need to reexplain a bunch of things. Oh, and the Memoir campaign bag looks sweet.  No, make that Sweet with a capital S. :) pk Posted by Patrick Korner on Apr 18, 2008 at 12:59 PM | #

I can’t wait for Merlin’s Company.  Looks great.  Now if only they would do the Pirate’s Cove expansion too. Posted by Jonathan Greisz on Apr 18, 2008 at 01:30 PM | #

Glad to hear of a Shadows expansion, I do enjoy a good cooperative game. Now that I’ve seen a picture of the Memoir carrying bag, I’m fairly dissappointed.  It looks like they are expecting me to have kept all the boxes for all the expansions in order to get them to fit into the bag...?  I’ve long since tried to combine them into something less unweildy so that I can take out the game and play it without having to haul around 4 or 5 seperate boxes… Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Apr 18, 2008 at 08:09 PM | #

Merlin’s company sounds great, but I had hoped for some new quest boards. Posted by Steve Finney on Apr 20, 2008 at 01:37 AM | #

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