It has arrived!

The final copy of Camp Nightmare has arrived.  Despite my worries that I had screwed something up in the UI and made a mess of it, nothing of the sort happened.  The game looks and feels fantastic, and it is kind of amazing to see something I built appear before me looking all professional like.  Here is a picture of the game set up to begin:

The main difference between the previous playtest copy and this one is that this new copy doesn't have a game board.  I liked the visual on the board a lot, but the cost of a full game board was extreme, and I found I could easily replace it with the round tokens you see in the box.  There are also some small balance changes to cards, mostly just there to make the game simpler and easier to understand.  Sometimes it is possible to streamline play and make the systems clearer without actually warping the numbers, and this last pass definitely had some of that.

The cards have nice rounded corners, unlike the old ones I cut out myself with scissors, and they have a really solid snap to them.  The quality feels good, and the colours came out beautifully.  One of the problems with my last playtest copy that I printed at the local print shop was that some of the darker cards came out almost black, and it was really hard to see what was going on in the pictures.  This is apparently a really common problem with the transition from computer design to paper, but the final copy looks superb and the colours printed exactly as I would have wanted them to.

The box even looks sweet, with a nice combination of pictures from the game on it.  I particularly like the fox on the back of the box, which is from the game card Cunning Fox.  I ended up botching the graphic requests the first time round, so Nathan had to redo the box art to make up for my goof, but the final copy really captures the feel of the game that I wanted and the text on the back works really well.  The box isn't anything fancy in terms of construction, but it is solid and hot damn if it doesn't look like something a real serious person made.

These tokens are the replacement for the board.  Instead of moving a single token along a track players use tokens like this to count their Wood, Food, Energy, and Fun.  I like that the Energy, which is an individual resource rather than a group resource, has a distinctly different art style to differentiate it from the others.

So there you have it.  I am going to play it a few times to make sure all of my final edits work and that physically the game feels right, but very shortly I will be putting up a big order to get 100 copies of the game so everyone can buy it.  Right now it looks like the final cost for the game will be ~$35 Canadian, but that is subject to currency fluctuations so I can't be perfectly sure until I actually hit the button.