Camel Up Off Season - Does it like Camel Up?

0:00 and we finish each other's sentence the sun and the moon lines up today for us camel up off season is it the same as camel up what do we think of it how does it play stay tuned hi it's terence and stella here from maple university welcome welcome back to our review this time we have camel up the sequel or the off season yes kill up off season indeed so this is this is not camel up it's not an expansion to camel up it doesn't really resemble camelot so that answers our cold open question this is a standalone game set in the world of camelot i guess thematically between seasons of camel racing you need to use your camels to purchase and transport goods and that's really what this game is about let's get to the off of you tarrant yes so what this is is it's essentially a big gateway drafting and pusher luck game um in so in the game there will be a number of markets equal to the number of players plus one it's a three to five player game so we've got those markets set up here and each market has at the start of the round a number of face up cards and a number of face down cards drawn from this big deck of cards cards yeah and there are some 3d

1:30 components that you can put them in kind of like the um not the original camelot but the newer version of camelot has but we're just showing them flat here for these purposes then there is a turn order auction so players with the money they already have with the money they already have do a blind beard and then reveal and whoever has the most becomes the first player obviously there is player screen as well playing screen as well right your money there you go and then in clockwise order from the first player you pick one of the markets so you would choose a market so i picked this one you would do the you could do the effect that's showing on that market so here for example you could you could lose one of these face down goods you could put it on a different market that would be your prerogative this one it doesn't have as many cards but it lets you go hunting through the deck for cards that you of a specific type that you want this one will let you take a carpet from somewhere else over to here before you took it things like that then you take all the cards and i'm just going to push these out of the way now because now the focus is on your camelboard so these are all your resources and you have to stack them onto your camels and you can have one good per camel one camel per good type so let's put pottery

3:01 there and i could stack dates up on here for example and you would keep doing that from round to round so let's say the second round i were to gain these i would choose maybe to put fruit here stack carpets here add another date onto here and so on now because because you're getting face down cards there is a risk here each camel has a maximum number of goods it can hold and if you exceed that amount you lose all of them so if i were to take a market right now that had two date cards in it i would go over my six limit and i would lose all of these dates so this actually for selling purposes it's two it's four but for this purpose is cards yes so at the end of each round each player gets the chance to sell from one camel and each of the four good cells in a different way so pottery you're trying to get matching pottery so i've got nothing i can sell here but now i've got two yellow that i could sell which would give me some amount of two yeah with the carpets you're trying to sell different colors so you can sell any number of different colors above two at once with the dates you they come in ones twos threes and fours and you get increasing amounts of money for every three that you sell at once and the fruit is an interesting one you've got

4:31 there are four types of fruit pomegranates are the cheapest then oranges bananas and pineapples and when you make a sale you can sell all of your cheapest type only so if i was selling here i would have to sell my one pomegranate for two coins before you can then work your way up to orange and then banana and then pineapple then you reset the markets and you continue going until the deck is empty and that is fundamentally the game this is a really big heavy game so you kind of like want to try to beat earlier i mean beat as a first player because there might be goods that you want on the on the board or the power from the market that you want and uh and i usually you know i i try to be i don't know how much i should be i'm a little bit tired when i beat usually in games in general yeah yes i know we've played games of scoville where nobody bids on first player at all and it just i think it's probably less important than that game than it is here i think the uh that turned out to be certainly quite important yeah as you say yeah uh what do you think karen i i think what they've got designed here is really clever i think the way all of the way you're trying to maximize your money without the camels falling over with some pretty tight restrictions on how much you can sell is very clever and seems to be very well

6:03 defined i mean there's a lot of set collecting games out there where and drafting games and things like that where different types of resources will give you points in different ways i mean that's that's very standard but adding the fact that you can only sell one and you've got a meter criteria to sell is extremely clever here and i've found that you know you've if you're alluded before if you're building up a lot of fruit if you're coming into the last round and you're finally getting ready to sell your pineapples you have to pick a market that is not going to give you any cheaper fruit otherwise you're going to be stuck with those pineapples or if you're building up like the pottery down here on my three camel it's going to be very difficult for me to possibly even get a set of two to sell off this before it all falls over the budget strategy as well you might want to put the pottery here but then you kind of you know you can't get this much dates to get a lot of money you you had you had some dates before and you had some vast before i don't know i can't remember what you had yeah a lot of things yeah we've yeah what we've found through playing is that generally speaking unless you're playing a super conservative game you're gonna lose a stack or two at some point and you've gotta um that to me in a game like this says it's really well balanced and and and optimized in design if you've got this risk of of pushing your luck but no

7:35 one ever actually pushes that far then you know you then you haven't made the benefit good enough or you haven't made the risks high enough that's correct yeah and then at the same time losing one of your stacks especially if it's a stack you're not that interested in it's not going to wreck your game so i think it's true it's true i think you i think that side of it is really good and i really like the different ways of selling of selling yeah i think as i say it's very standard to have lots of different ways to collect each set but i think this set of four works really well together as we said earlier this is not camel up so if you expect to find a game like camel up don't play camel up off season play downforce instead or something like that but this is completely different and it is still a good game we can't really compare with the camelot game because it's a different game but it is still a good gateway that can be strategized a little bit more and there's just little things that is very clever as as you said and you know the the market power as well there's one like everyone you flip it there's one that gives you plus one ability to sell which you wanna use to get rid of the pomegranate and then sell your more expensive things for example yeah let's say sell two things in one round so if your camels are all getting really full uh you can keep them lower yeah because you can't really like okay i've got this cheap pomegranate i want to just put it that you can you

9:05 have to put all type of same good like all fruits because they look not the same but still first goes in one camel and you just gonna have to also look around on your opponent and just see your opponents trying to collect carpet for example i mean does that mean that they put carpets in the number six so that means they're probably going to try to grab all the carpets do you want to compete on that you want to just if you get carpet you just probably put it in the lower one because there's a potential that you're not going to get a lot of carpets for example yeah i also like that there's only four goods from that perspective as well because and it's a with a three to five player and only four different goods um you can't get into that situation that you sometimes get in drafting games where there's six or seven different things that score in different ways you are all competing for the same things you're going to be overlapping so it does create that interaction interaction and tension exactly so highly interactive i think the only thing well it is a gateway it plays quick as as long as you know what the icons are the icons is not very hard but it could be a little bit because there are six different ones here to start with that's the only thing we have two different sides two different sizes eight oh ten ten different icons yeah uh twelve actually there's six markets so yeah there's a lot of these and they're written in icons so you've gotta refer to the book um you may have noticed all these things on the back of the uh cards as well this changes the

10:35 auction rules each round based on what's on the top of the deck there's a lot of different uh things at play there but there's also replay more repliability in that way so it's kind of like the balance of this overall it's a it's it's a nice game that plays what six five players six five sorry yeah five players so uh the other camera plays up to six and then eight newer version yeah so yeah still plays got a few players a bit of a chaotic high interactions and great game it has one it does have one issue um and

11:18 i say there's understanding that this is pitched very gateway um which is not an issue in that way but it's you know it is the terrorful not terrifying that's how i always describe it i know it's a it was a common thing in it was very common in games especially ten years ago where you've got a single first player and you've got no influence over the rest of the turn order you get second and then you still benefit yeah in this game you are bidding for first and then the rest falls out clockwise and you know as a as a eurogamer as someone who likes control um that can be very frustrating because you can if someone is bidding aggressively well basically it takes it out of your hands if you if you know you if you're in a position where there's one market you definitely don't want but you don't care about the rest you don't have that option to put a medium bid in and make sure you're halfway in the middle or yeah it falls it it yeah you end up in that situation where um you get benefited or less benefit oh there's one thing about the beating yes i did forget to mention that's assuming you're saying what i'm about to say yes i know what we are in sync i know what you were going to say and then i think okay go for it no you do oh with the bidding it is slightly unique so you don't lose the

12:48 money if you don't win but it needs to be unique bit like literally unique so let's say if like four player game three players beat three each they don't win because it's not a unique bit the one person that bit zero will win because it's not it's the unique the only one that's unique yeah and so high to low obviously yeah and so you can see it's one of those things it prevents you from you know mapping out all right i know that this card is worth a maximum of um seven points to me so i'm going to beat four of those knowing it's okay it does have that bit of flukiness in there because unique bits cancel well but then again in games like camel up off season i don't think people going to math it out like oh maybe they do i don't know i certainly don't usually well there were times i knew that there was something that was not gonna i wouldn't i wouldn't be fifteen before i placed a bit of 15 i would have to know i was going to get more than 15 out of it that's actually fair all right is that interesting yeah i think so you know we we can we can say all these things coming at it as some experienced eurogamers and say randomness and you know i hate that randomness it is a it is something that's going to frustrate some players no doubt um but and it did and it did frustrate me to some extent as well

14:19 but yeah you like it but i like the game and i really like everything else about the way that's designed um and overall i still give it a positive uh positive review and it's the sort of thing that i would uh bring to meet up i would bring to meet-ups i would introduce to to newer gamers at meetups and we finish each other's sentence whoa the sun and the moon lines up today for us yes what did you do well that's it have you played camel up have you played camel up off season what do you think so this is the newer one the off-season version do you like push or like or do you like beating games is there any other games that is similar to this that you like they would recommend let us know in the comments and that's basically it if you can help us by hitting the like button that would be much appreciated you can also subscribe to us with a video like this how to play live playthrough on the weekend and my shortened suites or the view and so on i'm also on instagram so find me there and hopefully we'll see you next time thanks for watching see you next time