Camp Grizzly

That's truly a shame, this it a pretty solid horror game. Expansions would have been amazing to have been procured.

Such a shame. I’m glad I ordered a copy from Ameritrash around 3 weeks ago. Got it pretty quickly and I’ve really enjoyed my plays of it... I would have been all over the expansion material.

RIP. Game deserved better. I'd have liked to see Ameritrash get their shit together and keep making things in the spirit of this. It's really something special.

I remember this thread when it was started at the end of last year and I kept thinking to myself: "Hey, I'll have to keep an eye out for that. I'm not really a fan of the genre, but everyone is saying such positive things about it." I finally got a chance to play it last Wednesday and... it was awful. AWFUL. Tedious, repetitive, predictable, and pretty easy to win.

Caveats: I find slasher films, by and large, to be pedestrian, so I am clearly not the target audience. I also typically dislike co-op games, but have been convinced by good ones like Spirit Island and Arkham Horror, back in the day (which was far more about thematics than gameplay.) Also, the person who taught us to play is not the best in social scenarios. He's one of those withdrawn guys who thinks it's appropriate to take cards from people's hands when they're reading them because the card isn't relevant to what's currently happening and he wants to move the game along. I don't think he quite realizes that getting into the spirit of the game, ESPECIALLY a game like this one, is important and letting people read the function of the cards (and occasional flavor text) is important for first-timers, even if it's not going to impact the game at hand.

So, maybe I just had a bad experience with a bad teacher, but I was soundly unimpressed with it. That makes me really raise my eyebrows at some of the quite glowing opinions here.

Horror is one of my favorite genres, but I tend to be snobby about it. The best horror is awesome, but I find mediocre horror to be tedious, and bad horror too similar to bad comedy. I find most slasher movies to be mediocre or worse, especially the Friday the 13th series that inspired Camp Grizzly. And Camp Grizzly makes extra effort to simulate the Friday the 13th movies, and yet transcends the source material to become something more entertaining.

Just yesterday, I was playing some other game with a couple of friends, and one of them couldn't remember the name Camp Grizzly, but described the game accurately and said he wanted to play again sometime. He doesn't often play board games, but seems to have great taste in the board games that he does like: Camp Grizzly, Arkham Horror, Dune, and Sons of Anarchy.

My initial review was a bit mixed, but nearly every subsequent play has been a blast. The game is a solid solitaire game, but I would rather play multi-player because everybody that has tried it loves this game. The only exception is that the game tends to fall flat with just two players, because one player inevitably ends up as a chewtoy for Otis while the other character fails to gather enough items for a timely escape, so they both end up dead.

Non-gamers love Camp Grizzly because it is so much more thematic than anything else they have played. The art is appealing and takes a bit of the edge off the dark subject matter. The rules are laid out poorly in the rule book, but easy to explain, and non-gamers pick them up pretty quickly. It's a shame that I will probably never get the long-lost expansion material, but the base game is easily in my top five.

I can see how a serious gamer might not like Camp Grizzly. If the quality of a game is strictly defined by quantity of meaningful choices, then Camp Grizzly is not a good game. The choices are often obvious, and all attempts at executing a long-term strategy will be thwarted by the chaos generated by the cards and the random re-appearances of Otis on the various nature trails.

Under ideal circumstances, I like to play Camp Grizzly with early '80s MTV music playing in the background. It helps emphasize the setting and get players into the spirit of the game.

Am I a "serious" gamer? I don't know. I enjoy complex games and am one of the few in my group that is seriously interested in 6+-hour monsters like Here I Stand. But every week I go to a local store gathering with my bag of games. Usually, I'm rotating between stuff that I want to try and/or stuff that I just traded for or things that I haven't played in a while. But, without exception, one game that always comes with me is Wiz-War, the antithesis of "serious" games.

I'm OK with stuff that feels more casual. I don't need things to be elegant or innovative all the time. I just felt that, unlike simple games which can often be elegant, Camp Grizzly was simplistic and predictable.

Shellhead wrote: Horror is one of my favorite genres, but I tend to be snobby about it.

Under ideal circumstances, I like to play Camp Grizzly with early '80s MTV music playing in the background. It helps emphasize the setting and get players into the spirit of the game.

Sometimes my eyes gets ahead of my mind when reading and I loved the idea of a camp grizzley taking place with the characters of MTVs Real World.

Like others here, I sometimes bash Kickstarter. The games tend to be over-produced and over-priced, with gratuitous miniatures and the equivalent of multiple expansions crammed into a base game. The playtesting is often underbaked, and the games are often derivative of better existing games. But I think that Camp Grizzly is an example of a different set of potential problems with Kickstarter. Without previous experience with marketing, production, and distribution, an aspiring Kickstarter designer can potentially lose money on an otherwise good game. The more ethical designers will distribute the finished games and eat the loss, but worse outcomes have also happened. And these losses feed the FOMO, by providing tangible examples of people missing out because they didn't back a given kickstarter.

And yet Camp Grizzly is exactly the kind of game that could only happen because of Kickstarter. It’s for a pretty niche audience, but even more so, it’s a *complete* vision, something that any publisher on the planet would have meddled with. Everything about the game, from its simplistic gameplay, to the art (which really is perfect for it), to the barebones production, it wouldn’t have been the same even if they did find someone willing to put it out. Imagine if it had had darker, more realistic art, or “meaningful decisions,” or plastic minis, or any other high production feature that would have felt wrong. No, the entire package here is just so spot on for what it was trying to replicate, cheap, shoddily made, dumb, fun slasher flicks.

I judge games almost purely on how successful they are at what they’re trying to accomplish, and by that measure, Camp Grizzly is a textbook example of a perfect game.

Good points, Josh, but because Camp Grizzly was published through Kickstarter, we now have a good game that went out of print after a single print run. And the equivalent of five sequels to the base game are out there in very limited supply for the same reason. That's great for Kickstarter FOMO, but leaves a lot of disappointed potential customers.

Hey man, don’t look at me, I’ve been trying to get people to overlook the $50 asking price and buy the game for 6 years now, across this site, BGG, cons and countless mentions on 2 podcasts. Of course it was going to go out of print, stuff like this is destined to. The cult classic status it’s going to have in future years also fits it well.

Hey, what do you know, it’s back on Amazon and folks are getting their orders from Ameritrash Games, even if it’s a little slow.

I was hooked on the game after my first play when I was able to sacrifice a kid named Lunchbox to avoid getting hit by Otis.

Josh Look wrote: Hey, what do you know, it’s back on Amazon and folks are getting their orders from Ameritrash Games, even if it’s a little slow.

Has anyone ordered direct from the publisher? It looks available there as well.

Sorry - I just saw the Frohike post. I think I'll go direct to the source. I hate Amazon.

Yeah, I think he took about a week to ship it out (I'm guessing he uses his "free" time on the weekends to get orders out). You won't get an email that it's shipped or anything. It'll just show up on your doorstep.