"Look What You Did To Him!" : A Review of "Friday the 13th: Horror at Camp Crystal Lake"

"I've got to warn ya! You're doomed if you stay! Go. Go!" - Crazy Ralph, Friday the 13'th.

Hey, folks! 

Before I move on to my review, I need to talk about my own personal experience with the Friday the 13'th franchise. The following quote is cribbed directly from my review of the first film, which I first published here back in June of 2019...which now feels like a lifetime ago:

"Just like every other budding horror fan in the early 80's, I was acutely aware of the impossible-to-ignore impact of the Friday the 13'th film series. Unfortunately, as a kid growing up in a small town, I couldn't venture into the theater or rent these movies from my local video store. All I could do was sneak an occasional peek at the lurid VHS box covers, which immediately caused my prepubescent brain to squirm with discomfort at the very thought of the taboo-violating horrors that haunted the magnetic tape inside.

"At the center of my fascination was Jason Voorhees, the through-line killer of the series. His evolution from deformed, mentally-challenged drowning victim to sack-faced, back-woods trapper to Ken-Dryden-meets-Rasputin brute to undead juggernaut really fascinated me. It didn't hurt that I was obsessed with goaltenders at the time and my favorite hockey cards were the ones that featured netminders wearing olde skool fibreglass masks, often jazzed up with terrifying, kabuki-style paint jobs.

"Eventually I did see a few of the Friday films, completely out of order, mind you, but what I saw was enough to warrant further exploration. Then, when Gun Media released their video game tie-in, I bought it, played the crap out of it and immediately became obsessed. I rushed out and acquired the first eight Paramount movies on Blu-Ray and I've been plowing through them in chronological order from start to finish."

So, to make a long story marginally less long, I'm a huge fan of this flawed, but oddly charming, horror series and, as a board gamer, it wasn't so much if I'd pick up Friday the 13th: Horror at Camp Crystal Lake, it was a matter of when my pre-order came in. After all, this would be the very first officially-licenced game to celebrate the venerable horror franchise.

As I was waiting for it to arrive, I anxiously devoured any information about the game I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, save for vague descriptions of game play and a few promotional stills, I really couldn't tell if my enthusiasm was warranted or not. For example: here's the elevator pitch from the publisher via Board Game Geek:

In Friday the 13th: Horror at Camp Crystal Lake, an anxiety-driven, press-your-luck horror game, players take on the roles of cliché camp counselors like the stereotypical Nerd, the Partier, the Nice Guy, the Final Girl, the Diva, and the Jock as they rely on chance and strategy to survive five nights being terrorized by blood-thirsty Jason. Coveted tools of survival are just within your reach to randomly draw from a camp bag: cast iron pans, gasoline, cleavers, flashlights and more. Collect them to make various combinations for points and use additional fear cards for ways to escape his attacks.

You have only strategy and supplies to keep you alive, but the odds of returning safely to the camp get slimmer with every turn! Steal supplies from your friends, take them with you to the cabin, or keep what you find and wait out the nights to be the last one standing!

Anyway, after I got super-busy during the summer as per usual, I kinda forgot all about it, and the next thing I knew I was getting a call to pick it up! Excite!

Well, I can say in all confidence that Friday the 13th: Horror at Camp Crystal Lake made me feel a genuine sense of nostalgia, Unfortunately, not the good kind.

Y'see, back in the Pleistocene (Latin for pre-internet) era, we had no way to check aggregate opinions about a board game, So, you'd often roll the die and buy it based on the cover art, description on the back of the box or, just as risky, blindly snatch it up based solely on the IP. Then you'd get it home, excitedly tear off the shrink wrap, examine all the cool bitz and then delve into the rule book, keen on sharing the experience with all of your friendos.

But then, invariably, something terrible would happen. A creeping sense of dread would start to come over you, and not the kind that makes for a memorable Halloween season. As the rules slowly peeled back the veil of ignorance, you'd start to realize that the game is, in fact, a giant dud and you just wasted your money. So it was with me with Friday the 13th: Horror at Camp Crystal Lake. The experience of reading the rules was like working my way through a spec guide for a mystery vehicle I just bought, only to realize that I've purchased a Yugo instead of a Maserati.

But I didn't want to damn the game solely by my interpretation of the rules. I also played it twice in one week with two separate game groups...aaaaaaand it went over about as well as a Voorhees family reunion where Dad finally shows up. So, to drop the the cheeky pretense: Friday the 13th: Horror at Camp Crystal Lake isn't the worst game I've ever played, it just does a terrible disservice to the original source material.

I say that with a very specific corollary. If you live in a world where Jason Voorhees is nothing more than "that guy in a hockey mask" and board games like Incan Gold and Gun Media's aforementioned video game don't exist, this thing is perfectly fine. But, if you're anything like me and you're an experienced gamer and a genuine fan of this franchise, I highly recommend that you give this thing a very, very wide berth.

So, what makes the game so disappointing? Well, let's start off with the good stuff:

THE PROS

• I own (and love) a lot of "press-your-luck" style games, like Pickomino, Dead Man's Draw, Impact, and Welcome to the Dungeon. So, right outta the gate, kudos to the designer for picking and appropriate central mechanic that I genunely adore.  
• The graphic design is decent enough. I like the "Welcome to Camp Crystal Lake" Cabin Board, the Character designs and the Supply Tokens.
• It can be tense at times and the ability to play cards to help yourself and fuck around with your opponents is kinda fun.

THE CONS

• I hate to keep harping on this, but Gun Media's recent Friday the 13'th video game offered the perfect template for a board game interpretation. Based on this, councilor players could choose from an assortment of stereotypical teen character with different attributes and skills and the solo person playing as Jason would enjoy a crazy assortment of insane powers, customized by whatever film version of the character they're using. The survivor players would then be tasked to run around on a modular map board representing iconic locations from the films, gathering up weapons and working on possible escape routes or survival tactics for yourself and others. Meanwhile, Jason is playing special cards to make the teens do characteristically stupid shit in an effort to set up some surprise attacks which come courtesy of a sneaky hidden movement system a la Jaws. Sadly, Friday the 13th: Horror at Camp eschews this in favor of drawing random tokens out of a bag and trying to make sets of boring items like flashlights (?) and frying pans (??). Basically, players need to master the nuanced and subtle strategy of not drawing two Jason tokens during their turn. * YAWN! *    
• So, the longer you press your luck, the more shit you'll collect, which gives you an opportunity to fulfill that turn's Critical Supply requirements, which is nothing more than a recipe card indicating a specific assortment of junk. Whenever players chicken out, they "return to the safety of a cabin" (because Jason has never broken into a cabin by force...oh,wait), gaining bonuses if they're the third, fourth, fifth or sixth player to do so. However, if you end up drawing a second Jason token from the bag during your turn, the goalie-masked, machete-wielding lunatic....spoops you so badly that you drop all of your collected items...and then you run back to the cabin anyway. That's right folks, in this Friday the 13'th game you collect frying pans and Jason never kills anyone. Like, ever. Dafuq? 
• Perhaps the games most egregious sin is that there aren't any variable character powers. Except for their portraits and names, the Nerd, the Partier, the Nice Guy, the Final Girl, the Diva, and the Jock are all identical. Considering how easy it would be to implement this, the absence of thise tiny bit of chrome smacks of utter laziness.
• At the end of the round, when all of the characters have either voluntarily or involuntarily returned to the cabin, your reward for this is...math! That's right, folks, you add up your scores based on all the stupid crap you've just collected! For example: "When dropping off 4 supplies of the same type, a player may double the value of 2 other types of Supplies they are dropping off that round. For example, after dropping off 4 Gasoline Supply Tokens (3 points each), a player drops off 2 Cleaver Supply Tokens for 8 points each instead of 4 points each, AND 1 Cast Iron Pan Supply Token for...."  *snore*   

 ***

   FINAL THOUGHTS

Look, I'm not here to bag on designer Sean Fletcher, 'cuz I suspect that he was put under some pretty heavy budgetary and / or content limitation. Most folks don't now this but, since 2016, the Friday the 13'th franchise has been embroiled in a massive legal tug of war between original creator / director Sean S. Cunningham and Part I screenwriter Victor Miller. Because of all this litigation, licencing ventures can't create new content nor use something that strays too close to what Victor Miller wrote. 

And I think that's why we ended up with a game where the rich theme is about as pasted on as your typical Reiner Knizia title. Except for the limited use of certain iconography (Jason, his mask and the "Welcome to Camp Crystal Lake" sign, for example), there are scarcely any references to the series proper. And that's a real pity since the first, officially licenced Friday the 13'th board game should have been a home run, the sort of Ameritrash classic that every horror fan has been salivating for since the early 80's.

For bearing as much resemblance to Jason Voorhees as Donald Trump does to Amy Steel, this Friday the 13th game scores two pips out of six with a tilt down into the silty bottom of Crystal Lake.