They Did the Mash - A Preview of the First Campy Creatures Expansion
It’s no secret that we REALLY like Campy Creatures from Keymaster Games. It’s a fun, gorgeous, quick-playing action-selection game with lots of tactical bluffing!
In fact you can listen to Jeremiah’s review of it RIGHT HERE!
Keymaster is launching a Kickstarter for an expansion, as well as a second edition of the game! Jeremiah had a chance to check it out with Jennifer Graham-Macht, the PR guru, and she walked him through the new features of the second edition and what’s included in the expansion!
So is this expansion a scream!? Or is it a bloated corpse? Let’s find out!
The New Stuff
I’m going to assume you know how to play the base game. So if you don’t know how to play it, check out the link to my review above.
So what’s new? First off, there are 4 new monster cards. You use these in the same way you used the Demogorgon in the base game: You swap out the matching power value card. So now you can choose to play with up to 5 alternate cards, giving a variety of options.
The new monsters are:
The Monster: he’s a big Frankenstein-looking dude
The Man-Eating Plant: Feed me Seymour!
The Tarantula!
The Giant Robot!
Next, there are now Locations.. There are 9 Locations (split between the second edition and the expansion). Every round you reveal one Location and the Location will have some effect that usually will help out the player who wins the Location for that round. The cool thing is that now the mortals have new (randomly distributed) Location icons, and whoever has captured the most icons on their mortals that round wins the Location and gains the effect for scoring that round. The second edition has a new bigger box, that will fit a new, bigger Clash-o-meter! Which will function the same, but will have a little more room for the score track.
What else?
There are 2 new Mortal types:
Assistants - These act like Pudding in Sushi Go. (Included in the second edition.)
Peasants —If you have one, score 3 points, two scores 5 points, and three or more loses you 3 points! (Included in the Expansion.)
But that’s not all! Now, instead of a standard deck of mortals that scales based on player count. You can customize the deck of mortals selecting certain types depending on the type of game you’d like to play (there are all sorts of combinations included in the rule book).
The second edition will feature the new set of mortal cards that have the location icons on them. But if you already have the first edition, if you back the expansion alone, you’ll get a copy of the second edition mortals to retro-fit your first edition base game!
That’s essentially what you can expect in this expansion/second edition. The gameplay really only changes in that there are Locations that will effect the scoring each round. But mechanically the game play is the same. Choose a monster, place it face down, reveal it, resolve it and capture a mortal. Let me give you some thoughts on this latest edition to Campy Creatures!
The Verdict
First of all, the artwork I’ve seen (some is still being finished), is on point with the base game. It’s what draws you to the game in the first place. It’s absolutely stunning! And that is consistent again here.
Second, I love that they’re retro-fitting your base game if you get the expansion. No one wants their game to become obsolete, and swapping out some cards keeps your game playable and is a nice touch! Well done, Keymaster!
The expansion does exactly what I want an expansion to do. Give me more of what I already really enjoyed with the base game. I don’t want so many new wrinkles in the game play that the game becomes unnecessarily complex—or, even worse, doesn’t feel like the same game anymore. The Location deck, new mortals, and new monsters don’t change the game’s mechanics at all! They make you try different strategies, and add variation and replayability. They give you what you want. More Campy Creatures!
The Final Verdict
Keymaster really listened to the feedback of the fans and made some well-measured, well-tested, and surgically precise additions to an already really fun game, and made it better. Your choice of Monsters, variety in Mortals, and Locations have all ramped up the replay value, and will give us more great stuff for a game that cracked my Top 10 last year! Outstanding!