Co-Op Interviews: Bruno Cathala & Serge Laget

Bruno Cathala and Serge Laget are the designers of Shadows over Camelot and the recent Shadows over Camelot card game. They were kind enough to talk to about their design in email discussions between August and October this year.


Picture by Toshiyuki Hashitani (moonblogger at BGG); used under CC license.

Picture by Toshiyuki Hashitani (moonblogger), used under Creative Commons

Shannon Appelcline: How did the Shadows over Camelot board game come about?

Serge Laget: I’m a teacher, and I use cooperative gaming in my work. In the years before Shadows over Camelot was published, there were no cooperative games for adults except The Lord of the Rings by Reizer Knizia.

At first, I began to work alone on a cooperative game. I met Bruno Cathala during this time, and I proposed that he work with me on the project. The game was born by the cooperation of our two minds!

Bruno Cathala: The story begins on Christma 2002. My sister’s gift to me was The Lord of the Rings, the cooperative game designed by Reiner Knizia. In my head, i said: “Wow … exactly what I didn’t want to have.”

At the time, I didn’t like cooperative games (because I’m a competitor), I thought that cooperative games were just for children, and I was not familiar with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings story. I had tried to read the book many times, but each time, I gave up after less than 100 pages, because the style was boring to me — as boring as the French author Honoré de Balzac! Continue reading

Arthur, Arthur!

Recently the folks over at Green Ronin Publishing published Hobby Games: The 100 Best, a book of essays about 100 top hobby games — be they RPGs, board games, card games, or wargames.

I was very pleased to have the editor, James Lowder, ask me to participate. I mean, any day when you get to write an essay for a book introduced by Reiner Knizia is a pretty good one. We talked a bit about what I’d write an essay on and we agreed upon King Arthur Pendragon, an Arthurian roleplaying game that’s one of my favorites because of the veracity with which it represents the Malorian legends.

I highly encourage you all to check out the book via the link above. In the meantime, in honor of its publication, I’ve decided to dedicate this column to its publication by looking at the board game side of what I covered there: the Matter of Britain.

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