Camp Grizzly

Thanks bendgar!
I'll be eating bologna-on-hand for the rest of the week, but I got 'em ordered!

3 is badass. Believe it or not. It’s BADASS.

Plus, all of them have new finales.

Goddammit, missed it again! Maybe third time's the charm.

Josh Look wrote: 3 is badass. Believe it or not. It’s BADASS.

Plus, all of them have new finales.

Dangit! You're not easing my mind!

It was also tough to plop down that much coin for several expansions to a game that I don't get to play often enough as it is. I had to cut corners somewhere.

Camp FOMO is even scarier than Camp Grizzly.

The "early bird" window is fuckin' brutal... because it opens & closes randomly like a guillotine, operated by a tired, demonic, unseen hand.

Back again. Someone tell Frohike.

GOT EM!

ME TOOOO!

MESEEKS!!! I mean...me three!

Mine arrived yesterday. The blister packaging is a bit generous, but no matter. The content looks solid, and the illustrations are as wonderfully violent as to be expected. The aesthetic/vibe is old school Mad magazine.

Friday night was the Halloween edition of the monthly hipster boardgaming group. Usually there are more women than men present, with a mixture of hipsters and roller derby girls, but this time there were more dudes. Nearly all of them had beards and flannel shirts, and most were drinking locally-made craft microbrews. I was 90 minutes late to a friend's birthday dinner, so both tables of players were already playing games. One more late arrival showed up minutes later, so we sat down to play Camp Grizzly.

Camp Grizzly is not a good two-player game. There, I said it. As soon as one counselor gets wounded, it's likely that Otis will hunt that character to extinction. There might not be enough time for the other player to collect a set of items for an escape finale, so Otis will soon focus on exterminating the second counselor for the win. That was exactly how our game played out.

One of the tables finished their game as we were putting away Camp Grizzly, so I brought it over to their table and easily sold them on a game. Six-player Camp Grizzly is generally a good time, but we had miserable luck this game. My counselor single-handedly added four to the bodycount just from discovery tiles and cabin card draws. Our only weapon was the shard of glass. We had a couple of early casualties, and then the blood moon came out, doubling Otis' damage to SIX. We lost quickly.

So we had to play again. Game three was better, especially now that everybody had a better idea of what to expect. Karen's boyfriend showed up late in the game to steal some keys (and deprive us of the Ranger Tower finale cards), and then we awesomely all escaped via the van and ran into his gang. The fight with the gang was tough, but we had good weapons this game and even Mr. Slicey. We all six won, and it felt like a well-deserved win after the previous loss.

So of course all the expansions arrived on Saturday afternoon. It was a nice, sunny day, so I was too busy wrapping up yard and other exterior projects to get much of a look at the new material. So far, I have only opened and examined the first two expansions. As Drewcula said, the blister packaging is odd. On the one hand, the expansions will look great if Camp Grizzly goes retail. On the other hand, the individual expansion packs are awkward products. Each pack contains at least a couple of over-sized cards, with a new character and another card for new rules or variants. Then there is a small set of regular cards, including Cabin cards and maybe Survival cards. A couple of new bases for the new character and the new cameo, and maybe some additional tokens like the ammo tokens in expansion #2. The new counselors that I have seen tend to undermine the co-op nature of the game and encourage more selfish play. One of the new cameos seems like a major pain in the neck, as he goes around the board generating new lock doors. The ranged weapons might make the game a little easier, so maybe the more challenging new elements help balance things out.

We played our first game with the expansions this afternoon. We went all in with the exception of the snuffed cards.

I have to say, this was probably one of the best games of Camp Grizzly I’ve ever had. There’s a lot more that can happen now (the Cabin deck was hardly touched when we finished) and a lot of it interacts in some weird and interesting ways. It’s a little bit sillier, but it feels like such a more diverse array of things that can happen.

We didn’t make it to the finale (body count saw to that) but we were close. It was more due to random stuff that could have happened in the game without the expansions than it was anything we added in.

Verdict so far: Sooooooooooo worth the wait. Folks trying to analyze if it will be more or less difficult, I wouldn’t worry, the decks are massive now and you’ll never see all of it.

Had my eye on the game for 2+ years, but finally pulled the trigger due to the recent developments. Hopefully it isn't for nought. At the very least, I'll finally have the base game I suppose. Fingers crossed more get made available.