Summer Camp Review by Jazz Paladin

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Quick Look: Summer Camp.

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Designer: Phil Walker-Harding
Artist: Adam Grason
Publisher: Buffalo Games
Year Published: 2021

 

Review

Who here is ready for summertime? I know for sure that I am!

Perhaps hoping to bank off of everyone’s nostalgia for those sizzling hot days where we were all singing songs by the campfire or making pinewood contraptions of all shapes and sizes, Buffalo Games has made an attempt to foray into the wild world of deck building with Summer Camp, a game that is designed for 2-4 players of ages 10 and up.

 

Thematically, the game sports all sorts of the usual requisite activities one would usually find while engaged in a summer camp. You can cook up s’mores by the campfire, take up water sports, make friendship bracelets, and just about everything you can conjure up from your childhood memories down by the lake in this highly evocative gaming experience. But does the game hold up to modern standards, or does it suffer the more grizzly fate of getting a fly-filled fruit salad for your summer cafeteria lunch? Let’s find out!

The game is thankfully very straightforward to learn. Virtually anyone familiar with deck building should be able to jump into the world of making bird feeders (and more!) in just about no time at all. Even if you are new to the genre, the rule book itself reads easily enough that you should be able to assimilate the requisite knowledge to play in about 10 minutes or so. 

The game is designed to lead a team of your colored meeple pieces from start to finish along three tracks. Each track has their own distinct merit badges (and some other rewards, depending on when you pass certain spaces) that can be earned — the first players to reach one of three bridges on each track, however, will also get a badge that awards large sums of points that vary depending on who got to the bridge first, with more points being awarded to those who crossed those particular lines first. So it is indeed a race to the finish!

However, there are other ways to acquire points. In typical deck building fashion, some cards that you purchase with “Energy” (the game’s form of currency) will also allow you to score when tallying up points at the end of the game, so just because you finished last doesn’t necessarily mean that you lost the game. Still, most of the large sum of points can be had by focusing on getting your merit badges as soon as possible, so ‘tis best not to dally…

Once a player has acquired all 3 of the merit badges that are at the end of each track, the end game triggers —whatever round is being played ends as soon as the last person takes their turn, and then points are tallied. It’s as simple as that. No need to go into too much depth, as again, if you are already familiar with how this style of game is played, it’s pretty easy to get the gist of things. 

 

Now for the analysis…

 

 

Things that are good :

The best thing about Summer Camp is that it could easily serve as the best way to introduce new or even young players to the world of deck building. Though the game is intended for ages 10+, my 6 year old was easily able to get in on the action in terms of learning the rules. The only difficulty she had was learning to shuffle cards, which is a requisite life skill for board gamers anyways, so it is fine by me that she can get a head start on this aspect!

Thematically, the game is a marvel, and again, works wonders with kids especially, which can magnetically draw them into the experience with its alluring presentation of gorgeous summer days and activities. My kids already want summer vacation and we are nowhere near to undertaking those types of experiences, but Summer Camp has already managed to get them excited about the prospect of doing the things they love in better weather. The game really does sport a lot of aesthetic charm.

Art is highly evocative, and is again part of what gets both kids and grown ups excited about the gameplay.

There is a lot of variety in the game, with a good amount of controllable aspects that enhance replay ability. The game comes with 7 themed decks (3 of which are used per game), which can be utilized in any combination, so the game shouldn’t get tiresome too quickly. These themed decks include cards and categories for “activities” in :

Adventure

Arts and Crafts

Cooking

Friendship

Games

Outdoors

Water Sports

Now as much as the game had its strong points, it also had its detractors.

First of all, the size of the board is too small. It needs to be a tad bigger to have its iconography clearly visible to all players, especially when utilizing a larger table. Moreover, the small board also unfortunately means small spaces for meeples to reside on, which freely can often get bumped or fall over inadvertently, as the balancing for them makes them feel like they are always living on the edge…

 

Although advertised with a playing time of 30 minutes, this is unrealistic for us ; with a 4 player count,  we virtually never played in under an hour, which means we cannot use this for school nights for the kids after dinner as much as we had hoped. As things currently stand, our games typically lasted from 1.25 to 1.5 hours.

Mechanically speaking, Summer Camp does not really do anything “new”, nor is it the most “complex” game out there. But this could also be seen as a strong point in the right light, as this also makes the game more immediately accessible to younger players.

 

Conclusion: 

 

 

Is this game for you? Perhaps. 

Players looking for an excursion into the world of deck building could easily find Summer Camp the best way to make an entrance into this exciting genre. Though it lacks the complexity of other titles, the game still manages to satisfy all who played it with us. And even though as adults we would probably only rate the game around 7 out of 10, the fact that we were able to use this Summer Camp to introduce deck building mechanics to our kids makes this probably closer to an 8.5 / 10 for family nights, which is priceless for the options it may end up bringing to our future gaming sessions with them.