Smokey Bears: Happy Camper

Sometimes, we will grab games for younger players because they have a youthful simplicity that we like.  There's a whole younger player section at Barnes & Noble where we have found some curious and amusing games over the years, including Cat Crimes, the very first post we ever did here.  



We did a test run of Smokey Bears: Happy Camper today, and while the production and design is well done, with a whole 3-d camper you can build, the game itself has nothing to it.  You choose an activity card which has icons of 7 items, then you find those 7 tokens, throw in 5 animals tokens and scramble them up.  Put those face down on the board.  From there you spin the stiff little spinner and move, and if you land on the compass you flip one or two tokens.  Items go on your camper, animals go in the five "Animal Friend" spaces at the top of the board.  If you get the 7 items first, you win.

What's odd about this one is, it says it's cooperative but here it just means you can choose to move any of the three hikers on your turn.  There are no other parts or pieces or goals or scoring.  In fact, after a glance at the rules, it was obvious to me that you don't even need that camper, so we left it unpunched in the bag.  You can put the found items right on the goal cards.

We will be donating this to a cousin with a young niece who will probably really get a kick out of this sort of thing.

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