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| by Ameritrash Games |
Nightmare on Halloween the 13th
For those of you who read my entry about Until Dawn in my Top 100 Video Games countdown, you know that I love slasher movies. Spending my formative years during the 80's and early 90's, I saw so many advertisements for Nightmare on Elm Street sequels and the bevvy of Friday the 13th movies, but the only way I was able to watch them was on TV, and they were edited for TV! So you know all the good stuff was taken out.
It wasn't until I was in high school and my buddy Garth got all of them on DVD that I was able to enjoy them in their fully unedited glory! They were campy and stupid and scary and, if I'm being completely honest, not any good at all, but they were always entertaining and I loved them.
There's just something about horny teenagers getting killed in increasingly horrific (and often comedic) ways that absolutely defines the genre of slasher. Even more postmodern films that try to dismantle these tropes, like Scream and Cabin in the Woods, eventually fall right into place along these lines themselves. You know why? BECAUSE IT JUST WORKS.
A few years ago, I heard about a new tabletop game called Camp Grizzly that let you play as horny teens trying to survive the night against a mask wielding psychopath!
Come on! Everybody's going. What's the worst that could happen?
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| How I felt every time they cut away before a kill... |
It wasn't until I was in high school and my buddy Garth got all of them on DVD that I was able to enjoy them in their fully unedited glory! They were campy and stupid and scary and, if I'm being completely honest, not any good at all, but they were always entertaining and I loved them.
There's just something about horny teenagers getting killed in increasingly horrific (and often comedic) ways that absolutely defines the genre of slasher. Even more postmodern films that try to dismantle these tropes, like Scream and Cabin in the Woods, eventually fall right into place along these lines themselves. You know why? BECAUSE IT JUST WORKS.
A few years ago, I heard about a new tabletop game called Camp Grizzly that let you play as horny teens trying to survive the night against a mask wielding psychopath!
Come on! Everybody's going. What's the worst that could happen?
Sleepaway Camp
Camp Grizzly is a mostly cooperative board game where one to six players control a group of Camp Counselors as they search their campgrounds for Weapons, Campers, and whatever they can use to escape, all while avoiding the resident madman in a bear mask, Otis. I say MOSTLY cooperative because, while the players have to work together, only the ones who survive the night win.
Players pick their Counselor, and all the archetypes are here: the dumb jock, the cool-guy loner, the spunky one, the virgin, along with fan favorites the slutty one and the black guy. Each one has their own stats and abilities, and on your turn, you move your Counselor spaces equal to your Movement. At the end of your turn, you flip up any "?" Token you've landed on revealing Items such as a Car Battery, Rope, or, if you're lucky enough, the all-powerful KEYS. But beware, because these tokens can also lead to Dead Bodies or even Otis himself lurking in the darkness.
At the end of your turn, you also draw a Cabin Card. These are sorts of random events that trigger things like fog rolling in or a player getting lost in the woods, but they can also be good things like finding a Weapon or a surviving Camper that you take under your wings for the night if you're lucky enough.
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| Poor Lunchbox... |
These Campers give you useful powers and Weapons are the only way you can actually defend yourself against Otis, so there's alway hope, whenever you draw a Cabin Card, but usually what happens is you draw a card that triggers an Otis Strike!
Like the best unstoppable, possibly supernatural, masked killers out there, Otis can be somewhere on the board, leaving you feeling relatively safe, but can appear out of nowhere to attack you if you draw the wrong card.
If you have managed to be lucky enough to find one of the lifesaving Weapons, you roll the Die it tells you to, compared Otis's Attack Die, and if you beat Otis, congratulations! You've fended him off, and he disappears off into the darkness... For now...
If Otis wins, or if you just don't have anything to defend yourself with, Otis deals his damage to you and you run away, while Otis continues Stalking you and your friends. This just amps everything up because as you take Damage, your movement (typically) goes down, and as Otis kills people (NPC's or not) he gets stronger, faster, and more dangerous.
Eventually, if you're lucky enough to find all of the items required to trigger a Finale (the end of the game) you can travel to one of the four locations and are treated to an end sequence straight out of a horror movie, with the Counselors setting a trap for Otis, or trying to outswim him, or even driving off only to get a TWIST ending (which I won't spoil here).
You may have noticed that I've been using the term "If You're Lucky Enough" a lot in the review, because, that's kind of what this game boils down to. You move, draw a random card, flip over some random tokens, and roll some random dice occasionally. There aren't that many choices to be made, really, except which face down "?" Token you'll try to head to, and even then, there's no rhyme or reason to where the specific tokens are placed. You have just as much chance of finding a Car Battery in the Girl's Shower as you would in the Tool Shed!
This problem is compounded when you play with more than four players, as inevitably, one or two players get left with just about nothing to do. They just wander the campgrounds, waiting to get attacked!
Players can't even strategize them searching for Weapons, or anything like that, because all of the Weapons, and Items, and OTIS STRIKES cards all come from the same deck! It's not like the Cabin Cards are divided into separate location specific decks, like in Dead of Winter, where you might find more Weapons at one location versus more healing items at another. It's like before Otis planned his killing spree, he snuck around, just HIDING stuff!
Hmm... Crowbar? That should go in the Kitchen, obviously.
Butcher Knife? I think that fits in perfectly in the Game Room.
If I put the Chainsaw in the Bunny Cabin, it'll provide JUST the right amount of Feng Shui for my killings...
It just... It just doesn't make a lot of sense, and can be incredibly frustrating at times, especially at those higher player levels, when one Counselor seems to be getting all of the stuff, and another gets killed within the first 10 minutes, but I guess that's pretty thematic!
If Looks Could Kill
Let me just get this out of the way now. This game looks FANTASTIC. The art is amazing, and I wouldn't expect anything less from an artist who used to work for Disney. Every picture is a hand drawn masterpiece, with just enough scare and camp to draw players into each and every picture, each and every time.
While miniatures would have been nice, ard are available as a separate expansion, the character pawns are portraits on plastic standees, and it helps give Camp Grizzly a nice retro feel to the game.
However, the tokens and health markers are not good. They are some of the thinnest punch board I have ever seen. It's not such a bad thing for the health markers, but for the tokens, which you have to place face down and flip over when you find them, they're so thin, that it's INCREDIBLY difficult to actually grab them enough to flip them! This might just be because I have sausage fingers, but still. I can't imagine they saved that much money going with that thin of cardboard.
Buy It!, Try It!, or Fly It!
Okay, so Camp Grizzly is not a good game. It's just not. It's pretty much a roll and move game with the trappings of an 80's slasher film. BUT, I honestly can't say that I didn't have fun when I played this game.
Camp Grizzly is SO RICH in theme. It really does make you feel like you're playing your own horror movie! And every time you play, it's a different story! One time, the dumb jock and the cool-guy loner started making out together after they went skinny dipping! Another time the nice-girl virgin DID NOT stay that way the entire game, thanks to the aforementioned dumb jock, before sacrificing some Campers she had previously rescued to save herself! The narrative twists and turns that you will experience with this game are something else.
I had a great time with Camp Grizzly, however, it was not BECAUSE of Camp Grizzly. I had a great time because it was a great shared experience with my friends. It was my friends that made the games of Camp Grizzly fun, though we could have probably had just as much fun doing something else, as well.
But... Camp Grizzly gave us a unique experience to share and experience, and after all, isn't that what all tabletop games are about? So, if you've got some good friends who can appreciate the theme over substance, give it a shot. Otherwise, you might want to steer clear...
The Verdict...?
TRY IT!
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