Donald Duck in Happy Camper
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Transcript
DuckTales woohoo if you enjoy having fun playing games that have nostalgic themes and just enjoying good game design in general then stick around for our review of Donald Duck in happy camper hey gang thanks for joining us to T from house Studio 3 I'm will Meadows and I'm star Meadow today we're reviewing the game Donald Duck in happy camper from Maestro media this game was designed by Wolf Gang Kramer and darl Andrews and it features the art from Jackie Davis this is a family weight game for two to four players now in this game players are going to be taking on the roles of huy Dewey and Louie and Webby and while it is a family weight game it's definitely not one of the my little kids game this has actually got a fair amount of strategic depth to it I wasn't anticipating going into it uh in the game players will start their turn by scouting a new part of the forest with Donald and Donald will have a different ability each round of the game as well then players can choose to use any of the gadgets they have picked up in carabiner to their backpack they might pick up resources on their tile or convert one type of resource to another then players can travel around the board a number of spaces that will be determined by how heavy their backpack is and while traveling players can build a tent if they have the resources and their tent will allow them to spend less movement to get out of a space after moving and building players can
then again choose to use any of the gadgets that they have left before finally checking to see if they have achieved their current merit badge earning their merit badge may require things like having tents on specific terrains collecting different types or amounts of resources or achieving multiple things on your turn the game takes place over the course of seven days and after the final day the player to have scored the most points from all of their merit badges become the senior Junior woodchuck Scout and win the game so I have to admit that growing up DuckTales was probably one of my favorite cartoons have you guys seen the new remake they did a couple years ago even better I mean I think besides X-Men this might be like the coolest TV show that I saw as a kid I was very excited going into this game and I'll have to say that it did not disappoint I was a little afraid that this was going to be the type of game where I roll and move and nothing exciting happens but uh in all of our game plays of this so far I have been like challenged mentally on the okay I have to get the exact number of spaces and I have to empty the things out of my backpack so I have room so that I can beat Sarah to look out points I can score the most points this has been like not a nailbiter but a very enjoyable game to play now you mentioned Lookout Point so on the far corner of the board where you can't get to yet cuz you haven't explored that part of the forest is Lookout Point and it's like up supposed to be up like the mountain a little bit and uh the first player to get to that point point will gain an extra merit badge for photography and
that space Also allows you um any two resources you can pick up um using uh your collector little Carabiner thing uh that you start the game off with as one of your items in your backpack um so getting there first is a big part of the game you can't move to any of those spaces yet you have to only uh explore adjacent spaces to what has already been explored and so and then you have to be able to move there so it does take almost the whole game to get back to that far corner of the board um but you are rewarded well for making it there first right and there are different varying points the first person to go there is going to get eight points and then six and then four and then two or something like that so you do want to get there first the game scoring is actually kind of low the only points you get in the game are for the merit badges that you earn so each round you can attempt to achieve the badge that you have everybody's going to start with the same one which is like have a tent on two different terrain types and then after that first one you'll draw two from the pile you'll get to pick which one you want to work on and then you can put it back you can do that every turn so that if you don't like the one you've got you can swap it out some of the badges are going to be worth more points but not a huge amount it's like two to three points two to three points yeah variables and so you the game does come down to were you able to achieve either more badges than everybody else or higher value badges than everybody else uh and then there is one final type of badge for the number of tents that you
have on the different terrain types yes so each of the four terrain types you'll get six victory points for having a special badge for having the most tents in that type of terrain so that's another 24 points that'll be split up and there could be ties um that could be split up between all of the different campers uh in happy camper yeah so you definitely have to manage the amount of resources that you're willing to carry in your backpack so that you can build those tents however the more resources you have the less far you can travel and so you're allowed to throw away things out of your backpack if you want to to travel further but you have to make that decision at the beginning of your turn and so even though this game has really handy player guides that tell you everything you need to do and even though the rules are not difficult the decisions that you make in this game are pretty like thought-provoking you've got to plan ahead okay I'm going to need to get to the Lookout Point I got to be able to build that tent I got to hold the resources my Gadget will let me transfer one there's like a lot of little things going on uh one more thing that does throw in chaos into the game is every round um Donald has an ability or event that will happen on when you move Donald at the beginning of your turn to go exploring and so some of those are just you can pick up an extra resource or you can move to where Donald is so you don't have to be on the same space as Donald to do anything most of the game you're probably not but some of them will let you maybe jump across the board um but then there are a few where it's move some tents and so that does
throw a lot of Chaos in because when you're on a space with your tent it only costs one movement to leave whereas if you're on Forest spaces in the center of the board it's three movement to to leave that space so it does help you out and if people are moving your tents you may be working on a marit badge for having tents in certain places or you might be trying to get to to the Lookout Point with as few movement as possible so that does throw the chaos a lot more and especially at a three or four player game there's going to be a little more of that going on a two-player game is going to be a little more head-to-head and strategic yeah and chaos is a fine word for it I would actually say that it's what makes the game most interesting because you don't know when those cards are going to come out there's more of those cards than we'll play in one game so there's you don't know oh is this going to be the round where I can hop to where Donald is or is it going be all the harder cards to deal with so yeah that that's a good twist in the game another thing that adds to the replayability are the number of gadgets that are in the game it's a pretty huge stack of gadgets you can only ever have three at a time and so if you get the really powerful gadgets you can go further in the game or you can only get gadgets on two different spots on the board though and so sometimes it's like well I've got the resources and I can build tents and Tents are how I get points so maybe I'm not even going to get the gadgets uh there's yeah lots of little things to balance in here yeah uh the the artwork fits well with uh the Donald Duck theme it's obviously has um a few scenes and stuff from the show all
the references yeah um some of the Donald Duck cartoons and so I feel like it does a good job of representing um that whole world that most of us are familiar with yeah I was impressed by the components in the game the little resource bits are actually not cardboard they're like real thin wood which is kind of nice everybody's got the inset player boards which is fun to be able to slide the cards under so that they gadget on and put be able to put stuff on top of I really enjoyed it I thought it was a good overall package I've enjoyed playing it with uh Sarah we've played it with my folks we actually haven't played this one with our kids yet which I'm I think they would enjoy it but I'd be curious to see what their response is since they haven't really grown up on the cartoon in the way that me and my parents did uh but we've had fun with all of our game plays I she crushed me the first time even though I tried to get my folks to go against her I think I won the second time I think she came back the third time so we've had lots and lots of good experiences with it I'm looking forward to playing it some more if it looks like something you would enjoy then definitely check out Donald Duck in happy camper from Myro media and as always thank you guys so much for tuning in following along liking our videos checking out everything here giving us a thumbs up at tantrum
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