Re: What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Shellhead wrote: First we played Camp Grizzly, using the traditional board plus the expansions with the cheerleaders and the ranged weapons. Only one cheerleader showed up, and she was trapped in an office where one exit was locked and the other exit was a nature trail that she couldn't use by herself. Every time her turn came up, I joked that she tried the locked door again. We quickly located the goods for a ranger tower escape, but Otis relentless hunted down both players with the items and executed us. Our replacement characters eventually retrieved the goods and the whole group successfully escaped via the Ranger Tower. I am a little worried that the new edition might be easier, but it's too soon to tell.

I am eight plays into the new edition (using the Modern Murder rules) and I'm actually losing more than I ever have. You're probably already doing it, but there are a few changes you should make sure you're using:

-You ALWAYS draw a Cabin card, as opposed to drawing one if you're not standing on an objective token. Keeps that deck moving and makes it way easier to teach.

-The keys do not start on the board, they only come out on a random nature trail after the body count goes up for the first time.

-Otis moves along nature trails if it's the shortest path for him to take to get near a counselor. (This was probably a rule before, but it's stated clearly now in a way that stood out to me)

-I don't remember if it was an old rule or not, but Otis still takes a normal turn of he was off board.

And not a rule, but a suggestion: Play the map where everyone starts in Morris's office. It's my favorite one so far. I also leave most of the Otis strikes cards in the deck.

Last game I played, we added the cheerleaders, the Happy Trails stuff and Otis's family. This is as vanilla as I will play Camp Grizzly going forward. It was brutal and fantastic. Things were already going poorly enough, but then Treehouse of Horror came up and, of course, we rolled a 4. We didn't even get three items to start a finale before we hit the end of the track.

That's it for my annual pop in to this site. Time to be hitting those nature trails myself...

I picked jump the bear and spin the bottle to add to our 3rd and 4th game. I like the 80s Schick. The newly announced expansion kickstarter might be the first one I ever pledge.

I've been playing with most of the expansions in at the same time. I counter-balance by not removing any Otis cards. This still might be a bad idea since games have generally been easy, but a bad draw can still give a lot of Otis Strikes!. It also leads to campers not showing up much.

I just don't like the idea of adding and removing cards from the deck all the time.

I play with the whole deck and it works well enough. May be more difficult when adding in the future expansion though.

I think the game comes with a few extra Oris Strikes cards to shuffle in when using expansions, make sure you include those when using the whole deck.

Maybe try a Pandemic style shuffle. Remove the Otis Strikes cards, shuffle the big old stack of cards, split into roughly equal piles, and shuffle one or two Otis Strikes into each pile?

As I reflect on my first two games of Camp Grizzly 2nd edition, I realize that I made a couple of mistakes. Not rules mistakes, but deck mistakes.

The first game, I should have stack shuffled the deck a couple of times before doing a regular shuffle, because the cards in the main deck are very sorted when shipped. When I first opened the box, I noticed that the main card deck was sorted by card border color on the front of the card. Maybe they were even alphabetized. So in that first game, we only saw a couple of Otis Strikes and then we won.

The other problem with both games is that I forgot that this edition comes with extra Otis Strikes in case people want to play with all expansions at once. So in the second game, we saw a lot of Otis Strikes. We still won, because most of those strikes were early when Otis was just attacking with a d4 and hitting for 1 damage. Plus, we were playing in Modern Murder Mode, which meant that we were only suffering character elimination instead of player elimination.