Are you missing a "not" in that sentence? Because without it, the statement fails to parse grammatically, and seems to be wrong.

You cannot play a Merlin to move Excalibur, but you may discard a Merlin (which is a white card) to move Excalibur if you are at that quest.

asmiles said you can remove the last standard black card played at any quest, not the last card played chronologically. All other posts seem to indicate the contrary - that you can only remove the single last black card played chronologically. Which is the correct rule?

From page 15 of the Book of Quests

You may use a single Merlin card to:
1) Remove the most recently played (from amongst those remaining on the board) Black Knight card

2) Remove the most recently played (from amongst those remaining on the board) Lancelot/Dragon card

3) Remove the most recently played (from amongst those remaining on the board) Despair card, if there is not a Desolation card which has been played more recently

4) Remove a Pict figure from the board

5) Remove a Saxon figure from the board

6) Remove a siege engine from the board


Also, three Merlins may be used to cancel the effect of a special (but not standard) black card as it is being played, without requiring one or more heroic actions.

A Merlin card cannot be used to move Excalibur, but may be discarded to move Excalibur (as per that quest's associated heroic action).

I hope this makes it clear to you what you can do with Merlin cards.

As for what Adam was (I believe) trying to get at... Suppose there are three black cards on the Blank Knight quest. They are, in the order played, Black Knight 3, Black Knight 7, and Black Knight 1. If another Black Knight card is drawn, the Black Knight quest will finish immediately, and Merlin cards cannot save it. If the knights hope to use their Merlin cards to prevent a loss against the Black Knight, they must play a Merlin card to remove the Black Knight 1. They cannot remove the (far more dangerous) Black Knight 7 while the Black Knight 1 is still in play. They cannot wait until they see another Black Knight card before choosing to remove the Black Knight 1. (Exceptions: Sir Percival can look at the top card before drawing it, so could look, see a Black Knight card, lose a life or place a siege engine instead of drawing it, and then use a Merlin to cancel the Black Knight 1. Similarly, Clairvoyance will allow a similar move.)

The knights could play two Merlins, with two heroic actions in two different turns, to remove the Black Knight 1 and then the Black Knight 7.

So, what else are you doing? If you go into the game with that as your central strategy, you will most likely lose. So, where's the additional strategy you need to make this a degenerate?

And if it isn't degenerate, what is the problem?


A "temporary lock" is also known as a "delaying tactic", and I don't see what the problem with the existance of delaying tactics is. If you haven't gotten into a superior position already, a delaying tactic will not win the game for you. The starting position is not good enough to let knights launch straight into the delay.


No, in most positions, this is not maintainable long enough to win the game - and I did not say otherwise. In certain positions that occur near the end of some games, it is maintainable long enough to win the game. When those positions occur, it is because the loyal knights have played effectively during the earlier parts of the game.


If you start placing and then fighting siege engines at the start of the game, you certainly won't win before this inefficiency matters.

Quests.

The additional strategy needed is "doing quests".


Well, this is true, but you wouldn't fight Siege Engines from the outset, so that point is moot.

Please note that this is now a different discussion, about the efficiency (or inefficiency) of fighting Siege Engines, and no longer relates to the potential Merlin lock that started the thread. Many people suggest that fighting Siege Engines is inefficient. I suggest that inefficient as it may be, there comes a time in many games where you fight off Siege Engines until you win, and it doesn't matter how inefficient it is.

Furthermore (moving further away from the topic), if it makes you win without question, then winning by 1 sword isn't a 'narrow victory' as some people in various threads have suggested. I read a post that said "we had 9 swords, then waited for other quests to finish and fill the table with Black swords - it was a narrow victory" or something like that. In that case it's as much of a blowout as a 12-1 win. This is an entirely different subject, but it appears the Merlin Lock horse has been beaten dead, so a change of subject is welcome.

You'll need to find a way to do those quests which is efficient enough to accumulate white swords quickly enough to win the game. As yet, you haven't described a degenerate strategy.

Yes, you can use Merlin cards to gain benefits in the game. That's the point of them, and I don't see a problem here. And yes, you can cycle them to an extent. This is a strategic option, and I don't see a problem with it either.


Yes, it is common to fight at least a few siege engines in a game. Nobody has said that fighting siege engines is so inefficient that this won't be the case. When I tell people that fighting siege engines is inefficient, it is generally a counter to the claim that siege engines are never a problem, because you can always fight them.

If one was to claim that fighting siege engines always leads to a loss, one would be wrong, of course. In fact, this is a requirement for an interesting tactical or strategic decision - that each option be the correct one in some situations.


Not if they only barely held off the siege engines while waiting for the swords to accumulate.

And if they aren't only barely holding off the siege engines, they should have somebody out forcing the swords to accumulate.

If it happens that information is incorrectly revealed, I take immediate steps to prevent that happening again if at all possible (and try to ignore any information I have gained unfairly). If I notice a situation in which information is likely to be incorrectly revealed, I take immediate steps to prevent that happening, even if it has not yet happened. That means that I will, at the very least, advise a player if he or she is sitting such that I may catch a glimpse of one of his or her cards.

Your earlier post seems to indicate that you waited until it was to your advantage to stop revealing information to your opponents. If that is the case, it was inappropriate.

My friend's observation from the game is that the 'degenerate strategy' of cycling Merlins popped up without us trying to go for it, and that could easily last long enough for us to finish out the White swords.

My assertion was therefore that actual;ly doing that on purpose would allow for knights to finish quests at a leisurly pace and that would still be 'quickly enough'... In other words that the Merlin Lock would hold long enough to do the required quests almost no matter how you approached them. I'm not suggesting that one knight rotate from quest to quest playing 1 card at a time, that might take too long, but it's a silly proposition anyway. As for finding a way to do quests efficiently enough... I think simply doing them IS efficient enough.

I'll take this moment to note that thanks to this discussion, I no longer think this possible soft lock is 'broken', especially considering the rules clarification and the fact that it probably only works in large games anyway. Rather my belief that the game is "too easy" has been reinforced.


The reason I posted thinking it might be a 'problem' was my friend's comment that as soon as it happens, you can automatically win (because the soft lock would last long enough to win the game, etc). If that were the case, then the game would be pretty trivial, as long as you draw the deck before you lose, then you win... However as discussed, it's no more an auto-win to get the soft lock than it is to simply win the game in the first place (at least with 6 players).


But... Seige Engines ARE never a problem because you CAN always fight them... and as you say, it is common to do so. I don't mean that you have to fight them all game long, but if/when they get to be a problem, they can be easily brought under control.


this is back to what I don't understand. How is it possible to 'only barely' hold off Siege Engines? Either you do or you don't- It's not a mystery whether you will defeat a SE or not. You can Merlin them away for good, or add up to 9 fight cards and assure victory. The traitor can put out at most 1 Engine per round, and Knights can fight off several.

I agree that while 'waiting for quests to finish' the knights (at least some of them) should continue working on them rather than just waiting for them to be lost (because that's probably faster).

Hey, we agree on something

When I read the initial post, "...I stopped 'accidentally' revealing what I was discarding..." I too suspected foul play. It sounds like the person would purposely reveal that he's discarding a Fight 1 so as to look like a loyal knight (that's cheating by the way), then when discarding a Fight 5 he would make sure to not cheat.

Sounded pretty shady.

I think theis game would be more interesting online where people couldn't 'accidentally' cheat or tabletalk at all. I know some table talk is supposed to be part of the game, but I still think the game would be more interesting without it.

I'd be interested in someone providing a more detailed description of how to set up and maintain this Merlin "soft lock". After almost 20 games, I just don't see how it could be maintained long enough to make any difference.

Seth said his group maintained the lock while performing quests. The last time I checked, performing quests required playing white cards. Also, each quest won returns less white cards than those spent to win the quest.

Some thought starters for a more detailed analysis (assume a 6-player game):
- Each time around the table results in 6 black cards played (assumes knights aren't in a position to continually burn life).
- You don't want to place seige engines, because:
- You want to use your Merlins to remove black cards from quests.
- You don't want to discard multiple fight cards to defeat a seige engine, because that waters down the Merlin discard pile.

So, how do you progress enough quests to avoid a sword loss, while:
- Playing enough Merlins to cycle them
- Actually being able to draw them (if you're slowly progressing quests, only the knights at Camelot can draw cards. BK and L/D cards are not plentiful enough to count on them allowing you frequent white card draw.)
- Not playing too many other white cards completing quests and fighting seige engines to create a larger than desired discard pile.

I think if you do the math, you'll see the game is specifically designed so all knights can't load up on white cards and maintain that state without the game overwhelming them.

I can't spend more time on this analysis right now, but if someone can detail out the setup of this "soft lock" scenario in terms of:
- Swords on the table
- Condition of quests
- # of seige engines
- # of cards in the knights hands, and how they got them

And the maintenance of the lock, in terms of:
- Distribution of the knights (on quests, at Camelot)
- Strategy for progressing evil (always draw cards, drop all knights to 2 life first, etc)
- Frequency of playing Merlins vs. progressing quests, drawing cards, fighting seige engines.

Perhaps I should have recorded the actual game state when it happened, but I didn't. I do know that the special cards that allow each player to draw a card came up (obviously, since we eventually saw all the cards). I don't recall which knights did quests or how often someone destroyed a catapult. With all the card drawing available in the game, watering down the merlin pile doesn't effect the lock all that much.

Note that we had the rule wrong about how to use a Merlin vs a standard balck card.

Note also that we did not set aside the game actions (quests, etc) in order to 'set up' this lock, and then attempt to win after that. Rather we played normally and before long realized that we could start locking the game up. This was in the middle of the game somewhere, before the knights had decidedly won.

Given the number of groups who have lost time and time again, I really don't think that anybody can say that the game is really too easy overall. It is certainly possible to become skilled enough to win consistently, though, and some groups will pick up those skills quite quickly.

However, for those who are able to win the standard game every time, I say: Talk to me when you are able to win every time with four players, drawing loyalty cards from a set of four loyal cards and one traitor card, using the squire rule and starting with three lives and four cards plus a Merlin. There are rules for altering the difficulty level, and they are there for a reason.


Tell that to the group I played with a week and a half ago, who eventually won the game with seven white swords to six black swords and eleven siege engines in play. By the end of the game, they had several knights unable to fight siege engines because they were out of fight cards.

If you have 13 siege engines in total (including those destroyed) placed during a game, fighting them off is not a problem. If you have 30 placed during a game, you will most likely suffer a siege engine loss.


If the knights have finished the Grail and Excalibur quests, a round of black card draws for three knights will place, on the average, 1.25 siege engines in a four-player game. That means you will usually get 2 siege engines placed each round in a four-player game with revealed traitor, when the traitor plays a siege engine each turn.

Fighting one siege engine effectively requires two actions - one to fight it, and one to draw back the cards you used. If you don't account for the second part, you are assuming that the knights can coast home on the cards they already have, despite the heavy cost of fighting siege engines, and that requires having done quite well up until that point.

If you do account for re-acquiring the resources used fighting siege engines, those three knights don't have enough actions to maintain their position against the siege engines. Even redrawing used cards assumes an optimum draw - Fight-4 and Fight-5, or a Merlin. Without that optimum draw, the knights spiral towards defeat even faster.

If you win the game after having just used the last of your Merlins and high Fight cards staving off siege engines, you have only barely held off the siege engines. If in the turn you win, you are praying for the black card you draw not to be a siege engine, the siege engines have definitely been a problem.

I'd contend that they CAN advise that that's a bad card and that it should be Merlin'd away. There is an example in the rulebook where you they say "The black knight is not strong across this bridge." or something like that. You cannot state its value. You can indicate you did or didn't like it.

Indeed, this would be a perfect way for a Traitor to both blow a small Black Knight/Lancelot/Dragon card AND someone ELSE's Merlin.

Let me try a different approach to the "Merlin lock".

Let's say you want to get at least 5 white swords before instituting the Merlin lock. You could win Excalibur and Grail quests using a minimum of 12 white cards. To do this, you would need to avoid drawing black cards as much as possible, and destroy any Despair/Desolation cards with Merlins. You'd win 5 white swords (6 w/Heroism) and 14 white cards.

Let's walk through a possible progression of turns to set up the lock. Assume 7 knights, no traitor.
Beginning of the game: 42 white cards in hands, 42 in draw pile.
Turn 1: All knights burn a life and draw cards. 55 cards in hands, 27 in draw pile (Gawain drew 3 cards).
Turn 2: All knights burn a life. First knight (Gawain) plays Convocation (~10% chance he has it). Second knight (Galahad) plays Fate (~10%) and draws cards. Three knights move to Grail, two to Excalibur. Tristan moved to Excalibur for free and discarded a card. 70 cards in hand, 11 in draw pile, 3 in discard pile.
Turn 3: All knights burn a life (down to 1). 5 questing knights play a white card, two knights (Gawain and Galahad) draw cards. 70 cards in hands, 6 in draw pile, 8 in discard pile.
Turn 4: All knights place seige engines (7 total). All knights play a Merlin (Galahad's for free) to blow up seige engines. Galahad draws cards (now has 13). 65 cards in hands, 4 in draw pile, 15 in discard pile (7 are Merlins).
Turn 5: All knights place seige engines (7 total). Gawain draws cards (now has 13). Galahad moves to the Grail quest before it's completed. The 2 knights at Excalibur play a white card, winning Excalibur. When Excalibur is won, the remaining 4 cards are drawn, causing the now 17 cards in the discard pile to be shuffled and placed as the draw pile. Then 3 more cards are drawn to complete the 7 for winning Excalibur. Next the knights at the Grail play one more Grail card and win the Grail, causing 7 more white cards to be drawn. Remaining 2 knights draw cards at Camelot. 80 cards in hand, 3 in draw pile, 1 in discard pile.

Let's take a game status:
- Round table: 5 white swords, 0 black.
- Grail and Excalibur quests are complete.
- 7 seige engines on the board.
- No black cards on any quests.
- 80 cards in hand, 3 in draw pile, 1 in discard pile.

To win the game, you'll need to get 5 more swords, at least 2 of them white. Yes, you could now maintain the Merlin lock by drawing black cards, then blasting them with the Merlins you likely now hold, but you'd have to start burning through white cards to fight the seige engines that Excalibur and Dispair/Desolation cards would place. If you use your Merlins on the seige engines, you won't be controlling the black cards on quests. And every time you use a Merlin, you're not advancing quests (Galahad excepted). The only group quests available at this time are the Picts/Saxons, which would require significant table talk or fortuitous card distribution to be won in one turn, which means you'd have to deal with 8-14 black cards before you get your next white sword.

In the early turns, if you draw black cards instead of placing seige engines or losing life, you're extremely likely to have drawn several Excalibur or Dispair/Desolation cards. To overcome the Excalibur cards, you'll have to discard more white cards, making it harder to set up the Merlin lock.

Pretty soon, by either blowing up seige engines or advancing quests, the white discard pile will build up faster than you can win quests and draw cards at Camelot. The lock will be broken, and you'll be several swords short of a victory with several seige engines on the board. And this scenario assumed a near perfect distribution of Grail and special white cards at the beginning of the game. All in all, an extremely unlikely scenario to occur, and if it did, the Merlin lock would be unlikely to be maintainable long enough to guarantee a win.

Ouch! My head hurts. Someone check my math -- I'm going to bed.

I'm not sure about your math, but there are some issues about your analysis...

1. You need 7 White swords, not 10, to win. I believe your summary said you had 5 White swords and needed 5 more.

2. Doing Excalibur and the Grail first makes more Siege Engines show up from black cards... that's probably not the way to go. I'd recommend Lancelot and one or both wars first. The you get 3 or 4 white swords in play and can 'finish up' with grail or Excalibur.

3. It's unnecessary to avoid drawing Black cards alltogether, as all of the quests require multiple black cards before they are lost.

3b. In fact, playing Black cards keeps the White cards in hand high, as some of them can be placed face down (Lancelot, Black Knight).

3c. If you get Lancelot's Armor, then it's even better to draw Black cards (that player at least) as you have some control over what you get. Similarly, Clairvoyance can be very helpful in that regard.

4. It seems (to my group anyway) that paying life for extra actions is a better deal than paying progress evil most of the time.

5. It is unnecessary to avoid black swords. You can win with 6 black swords on the table, and it doesn't matter if they come first or last.

... all of these comments go for the game itself, whether trying for some kind of Merlin lock or not.

Responses to your points:
1. My summary said you need 12 swords total, 7 of them white. After getting the initial 5 white swords, you still need 7 more swords, 2 of them white.

2-5. I don't disagree with any of these points as being good strategy suggestions.

I was not suggesting general game strategy. The scenario I proposed was an attempt to determine if the Merlin lock could be predictably set up, then maintained. If you do the Armor and Saxons first, you'll have spent 10 white cards to get only 8 back, which weakens the ability to set up the Merlin lock. Also, you'll only have 2-3 white swords. I would want to get more white swords before establishing the lock, because once you have the lock, you'll need to burn through your Merlins to keep the lock going. That take Heroic Actions or counters, thus slowing down completing quests, allowing black swords/seige engines to accumulate.

The more quests you complete before trying to establish the lock, the more white cards you'll have played, thus hindering your ability to establish the lock. This becomes a slippery slope, leading to the lock never being established. My scenario was designed to allow the fewest white cards to be played for the most white swords won, thus having the smallest possible discard pile and highest percentage of Merlins available when reshuffling.

I agree that my scenario isn't a good approach to try to win the game, it's purpose is to reliably set up the Merlin lock. Since I believe I've demonstrated how setting up the Merlin lock later in the game is significantly less likely than at the start, I believe this Merlin lock strategy is not likely to occur anytime it could be used to help win the game.

Your analysis dealt with an immediate attempt to get the lock right from the beginning of the game. Setting aside the fact that you don't need the lock at the beginning of the game in order to win, I don't see where your analysis addresses how it gets significantly less likely as the game goes on. It seems to me that as the game goes on players can draw more cards, and some white cards will be 'in limbo' at quests... If anything the Merlin lock would be more likely to set up later in the game. And in practice, that's what happened- we happened upon the lock midgame, and we weren't even looking to set it up.

But you weren't playing with the correct rules, right? If that is the case its irrelevant what happened in your game since it wouldn't necessarily have happened in practice if you played the correct rules.

Have you since played another game of SoC (with the correct rules) and held the lock? If so - that would be an interesting thing to know about. But there is no point discussing something that happened 'in practice' during a game played illegally. Sometimes a very small rule error makes a massive change to how a game plays that is hard to envisage until you actually play with the correct rules.

HERE'S a house rule for you: After you play a Merlin card or a set of three Merlins, remove one played Merlin permanently. Eventually, you'll watch that cycle get smaller and smaller. If that doesn't make your game more difficult, remove them entirely.

I have not yet played the game again. We did, in fact, use incorrect rules. However, in this case playing by the correct rules will likely (based on thought, not practice) result in the same effect, only slower. I'm not sure.

I will try to get my friends together this weekend to try it again (with the correct rules) and see if the lock comes up - or maybe see if we can make it come up.

- Seth

You need 7 to win when there is no traitor, and you can never count on there not being a traitor in the standard game. (If you are trying to find sure-fire methods of winning the introductory game, I don't think we have anything more to talk about.) With an undiscovered traitor, at least nine white swords are required for victory, and ten for true safety (to account for the possibility of the traitor engineering a situation in which the game ends just after he makes a false accusation).


The Grail and Excalibur quests become much harder as the game goes on, because the number of cards you need to play to win them increases. If you need to ignore these quests early in order to set up your lock (which is only temporary, so you have to finish the game quickly before it runs out), I think you would improve your chances of victory by not even attempting the lock.


Strategically, this is not true. I have examined the maths behind this elsewhere.


See above regarding the traitor. If you acquire six black swords before the end of the game with a traitor in play, you have lost.

Sedjtroll, it looks to me like you may be trying to win using strategies that others have tried and found to work poorly. Do you really think that the Merlin lock, weakened by use of the correct rules, is going to save the game for you under those circumstances?

Try http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geekforum.php3?action=viewthrea..., about halfway down.


Actually, that's precisely what the maths says. Neither paying life for progression of evil nor extra heroic actions is, overall, more efficient than the other, so which is the better option depends on the situation in the game. Often, what needs to be considered is whether you need to progress the quest that you are attempting, or the quests that others are attempting. As you point out, there will also be times when the ability to play a special card or accuse the traitor without sacrificing quest progress will be important.

Ignore is not the same as Don't complete first.

So I played a 3 player game tonight, and did everything in my power to try and lose (without simply not doing anything) just to see what it would take. If only I'd been the traitor that would have been a great idea, sadly out fo 4 loyalty cards NOONE got the traitor (again) - and that became pretty obvious part way through the game. We decided to play it straight, no rules to make it harder, except a concentrated chance of a traitor being there: 3 Loyal cards and 1 Traitor.

I posted a session report about how the game went.

I don't know anymore, but in theory, yes. Just out of curiosity, which strategies that we've been using have ben proven to work poorly?

If you want to see poor play, you should read my session report from last night!