Camp Grizzly

The KS is live! www.kickstarter.com/projects/trickortrea...-edition/description

Glad people can finally get this. Price seems reasonably for all expansions in the US given how crazy they got.

I've never kickstarted anything but this is tempting... but since a retail is promised, I'll likely wait.

I managed to get the original version during the brief period after the original Kickstarter when they were selling some copies on the Ameritrash Games (the original publisher of Camp Grizzly) website. I managed to pick up the five expansions later via Amazon, during the brief time that they were available there. Even so, I kickstarted this 2nd edition this morning. I am one of the 45 (so far) backers of the retail edition, because I don't see the merit in paying an extra $19 for some wood and acrylic pieces. I like that the new edition has a double-sided board with some randomized setup rules. I hate that they added a mode that doesn't have player elimination, but at least they left the original mode in the rules as well. I feel sad for people who lack the emotional stability to handle player elimination. (I actually have a stronger feeling than that, but I am keeping my post profanity-free.)

I looked at the mode that doesn't do player elimination and it mostly just seems to be letting them grab a new counselor. Which to me sounds like it gives more victim potential to Otis? I've never played but I know he gains power when he kills people.

Can someone with expansion experience detail the best way to use them? Like only a couple at a time, but are any of them the kind where you absolutely never play without them?

I used to throw them all in. Some minor curation may help, but I view it like Wiz-War, the wilder the better.

I could see leaving out the hidden traitor possibility, at least for the first few games. I say this also not knowing how well it is even implemented.

hotseatgames wrote: I looked at the mode that doesn't do player elimination and it mostly just seems to be letting them grab a new counselor. Which to me sounds like it gives more victim potential to Otis? I've never played but I know he gains power when he kills people.

Can someone with expansion experience detail the best way to use them? Like only a couple at a time, but are any of them the kind where you absolutely never play without them?

Good point. I am fine with character elimination as an alternative to player elimination, and yes the dead characters add to the Otis body count and give him level-ups and a shot at a violent endgame.

Regarding the existing expansions:

1. Spin the Bottle: This expansion is fine and we always play with it. It is addresses a core theme in horror movies, which is that sex is bad and often results in the participants getting murdered by the killer. Becky the Queen Bee was a revelation, as our group finally understood that this is a semi-cooperative game, not just a co-op game.

2. Keep Your Distance: We always play with this expansion, though ranged weapons slightly break the usual slasher movie tropes which focus on melee attacks. The new counselor Jackson is a ringer for a character from Dazed and Confused, and supports the semi-cooperative nature of the game.

3. Behind the Bear: Haven't tried this expansion yet. The game is hard enough without having a non-random Otis chasing us around, and the hidden traitor mechanic has been over-used by other games. The new counselor Saffron is fine and is always in the mix when we play.

4. Jump the Bear: We always include these cards, but they weaken the summer camp slasher theme somewhat by bringing in other horror tropes. It's nice to have four more finales, and counselor Chet is the notorious Chet played by Bill Paxton in Weird Science.

5. Rated R: Only played with the Snuffed cards a few times. The good thing about the Snuffed cards is that they accelerate the pace of the game with each player elimination, which the eliminated players appreciate. The bad thing about the Snuffed cards is that they make the game harder. The four additional finales are welcome. The new counselor Jason is a potential second killer, which could make the game harder, so I usually leave him out. We did have one game where our friendly neighborhood libertarian was playing Jason with the obvious hope that he would soon get to attack the rest of us. Unfortunately, he never got triggered into a killer, and instead died like a regular victim late in the game.

If you want to see some entitled fucks, just check out the KS comments. So many graphic design experts in there!

I'm not a graphic design expert but do find myself in the "graphic design is somewhat worse than the original" camp with respect to the card layout. They're an improvement from a legibility perspective but it's not like this is a game that requires careful parsing of the cards in play from across the board. There's a legitimate tradeoff between legibility and showcasing the art and given that a large part of the appeal of the game is the illustrations, making them feel more cramped is not the decision I would have made. You don't need to be an expert to see the increased tightness of the crop of the art in their "What is different?" graphic on the campaign page.

I don't really expect the publisher to make any changes given their response to criticism of their Texas Chainsaw Massacre game's difficulty and I'm not haranguing them in the comments but it does seem like a legitimate thing to complain about particularly since the layout could still be updated in theory.

I also think those acrylic standees look quite a bit worse than the chipboard ones to the point that I'd rather pick up a retail copy instead of the deluxe. If there was a way to get a deluxe edition with the normal standees I'd consider it for the other upgraded bits.

On the standees, is the issue you're having that they don't have the colored outline for clarity?

Here my lack of expertise really is showing because I'm lacking the words to tell you specifically why they look worse but I think it's the absence of the border and the variety of shapes that make them look bad to me.

I've gotten the impression that you're skeptical of the illustration style itself but the whole aesthetic is a faux-retro campy vibe and the chipboard standees convey that tone much better than the illustrations on their own. They look like pieces you'd find in a game of that era. It can sound hypocritical because for the cards I want more art and here I'm asking for less but I think it's a case that the full character art is already available on the player boards and the standees are pawns to represent them; making them look less like pawns is worse whereas on the cards, the art conveys a lot about what the card is doing so cropping to make it feel tighter takes away from the intended effect.

I love acrylic standees but I 100% agree in this case. The plastic aesthetic tips the game farther away from it's grimey lo-fi feel and tips the scales too far towards the cartooney angle for me. It softens the game in a way I'm not fond of.

One of the reasons I chose the retail version to kickstart is those acrylic standees. I think that the colored borders on the retail standees will be easier to identify at a glance than the acrylic standees.

Coming out of hiding just to report that I have played this new, highly controversial "Modern Murder Mode" that eliminates player elimination. My verdict...

....IT RULES.

Now, there is a caveat to that. I tried it out with just two players. I'd usually never want to play it with 2 players, let alone without player elimination. My wife is also a big CG fan and we never get to play it anymore because we don't have that many people over any more, but we were both jonsing for it and decided to give it a shot.

I'm not exaggerating, this was as fun as the game is with 4+ people. The way it works is that counselors lost before the finale can be replaced. Once you're in the finale, death is final. I didn't expect to like that, turns out it's totally fine. Otis gets stronger, there's a body you usually have to recover items from, it actually adds tension in a low player count game rather than takes it away. The secret ingredient to it though is that it changes how the keys work. They don't start on the board, but rather appear at a random nature trail the first time the body count increases for any reason. After at least 50 games of Camp Grizzly, everyone not heading to the keys was an unexpected breath of fresh air. When the keys did appear about 3 rounds in, they appeared in the worst possible place at the time. The rest of the game was brutal and hilarious. You know, the way Camp Grizzly has always been.

Would I play it this way with 4+ players? Probably not, but 2 or 3, yeah, absolutely. This mode is going to get CG on the table more often for me and that is nothing but a good thing for what has become my #1 game over the last 10 years.

EDIT - Nah, I WOULD play this way at any player count. Otis gets stronger in this mode and Otis getting stronger makes the game more fun.

TL;DR: Don't be so macho, give it a go if you're shorthanded and are itching for some hot Otis action. Game's not that deep, stop taking it so seriously.

Back to my cave I go.