For those of you who read our Gen Con articles (Most Anticipated Games and Recap), you’ll notice that Camp Grizzly: 2nd Edition was my most anticipated game and it was also my pick of the convention. I picked up a copy of it at the con, and I think I must have played it 4-5 times there with different groups.
Now that I’m back home and have had a few more plays under my belt, the question remains whether the game still shines outside of the convention atmosphere. Let’s find out!
Gameplay Overview:
Camp Grizzly takes the classic B-movie schlock and dials it up to 11. You and your fellow players take on the role of camp counselors where a homicidal maniac is on the loose. Think Friday the 13th, only this time he’s named Otis. Your goal is to collect the items from the camp to unlock one of the four possible finale locations. To do that, the game has a really simple round structure.
On a player’s turn, they can move spaces equal to their health. For the most part, you are trying to get to item tokens around the board. As you take damage, your health, and thereby movement drops until that last bit of adrenaline kicks in and you get a boost before you die.
Then, at the end of your turn, you draw a camp card. These can be good: weapons and items; bad: Otis surprise attacks you, or the power goes out; or neutral: you’ve found a camper or an NPC.
After each counselor has taken a turn, Otis gets to go. He stalks towards the closest counselor, and if he reaches them, he attacks. Attacks are handled via opposed dice rolls. However, to even make a roll, you need to find a weapon. No weapon to defend yourself? Well then you just take the damage, panic, and run away.
In true horror movie fashion, you can’t kill Otis. If you defeat him in combat, he leaves the board, giving you a bit of a reprieve until he appears back on the board via a jump scare on his next turn. But every time he kills someone, be it a player, camper, or NPC, his body count track increases, which makes him stronger, faster, and deadlier.
If a player dies, they can respawn as a new counselor (more on that later) and keep up the good fight. The game ends when either the players have made it to a finale and either succeed or failed, or if the body count track maxes out, then there is a final showdown with Otis to determine who lives and who dies.
Game Experience:
After quite a few plays of Camp Grizzly, the shine has definitely not worn off for me. While it’s not the most strategic game, and luck plays a big part in how well you do, where it excels is creating stories and memorable gaming experiences. You move around the board, trying to find the right items, as a killer relentlessly stalks you.
In one game, we had everything we needed for the boat finale, and thought things were going pretty easy. Then Otis found us there, attacked, and panicked all of us away. Let me tell you, things spiraled down from there. As we were regrouping to get back to the docks, Otis got between 3 of us (at the docks) and 1 player trying to make his way there. Since any player can trigger the finale once all the items are present, we had a choice to make. Do we try and keep the boat there and wait for our friend, or high tail it out of there to save our skin?
We told our friend we’d remember him as a hero and jumped in the boat, triggering the finale. When that happens, anyone left behind is killed by Otis. The joke was on us, though, as the boat ended up being broken. There are several finale cards in each stack, so you never quite know how it’s going to play out. Those of us who survived had to jump in the water and swim for it. Otis then proceeded to hack up the slow swimmers, but luckily one of us got away, giving the team a win. That was some of the most fun we’ve had playing a game in a while and a story we told throughout the convention.
One of the nice things about Camp Grizzly is that the rules don’t get in the way of the experience. Move around the board, draw a card, roll some dice. Is the game swingy?. Absolutely. A bad dice roll or an untimely card draw can take you from full health to near death. Expect people to die in this game. It’s a horror movie, and you know what happens to teens in the woods (and yes, you might have a chance to do that other thing teens do in the woods…).
Astute readers will notice that I said this is Camp Grizzly: 2nd Edition. The original actually came out back in 2015 and has long since been out of print. What’s great, though, is that you can either play with the original ruleset (called classic mode) or modern murder mode. The main difference is that in classic mode, you always control 6 counselors, and when one dies, they are out of the game. With modern mode, each player just controls one character, and when they die, they respawn with a new character. While I appreciate the tension from the original mode, I’m not a fan of player elimination or controlling multiple heroes, so I love that they’ve updated the game with more modern rules that are overall better in my opinion.
Finally, I want to note that this second edition also comes with all the out-of-print expansions for the original game. There are 8 in total and range in variety and complexity. The rulebook recommends not playing with more than 3 at a time. Here are some the highlights: Behind the Bear, which adds a hidden traitor mechanic; Keep Your Distance, which adds ranged weapons; Happy Campers, which gives a ton more counselor options; and Jump the Bear, which adds more schlock, this time with an 80s flair. In general, these expansions just up the variety and replay value of the game.
Final Thoughts:
Camp Grizzly: Second Edition was exactly what I was looking for in a horror-themed board game. It drops the players into a familiar, yet terrifying situation and says, “go ahead and try to survive”. It doesn’t get in your way with too much bookkeeping and rule lookups. Instead, it leans into the stories that come from the cards drawn and some lucky rolls.
If you are a fan of the horror genre, this is absolutely a game to get. Everyone I’ve played it with has really enjoyed it, even when they are horribly murdered. It’s classic horror movie schlock, and I’m here for all of it.
Final Score: 4.5 Stars – Camp Grizzly roars back with a second edition and makes it one of the definitive tabletop games for horror movie fans.
Hits:
• Easy-to-learn rules that don’t get in the way
• Scales well for any of its player counts
• Lots of variety and replay value
• Many classic horror movie references
Misses:
• Can be a bit swingy and luck-driven
