It is hard, although not completely impossible, to get enough dice to do everything on a turn: attack, defend and gather all three resources. By allowing players to get a glimpse of everyone’s dice outcomes and only then hiding the actions that result from them, the stakes are instantly raised without making the atmosphere around the table too tense. While upgrading your base and buying more dice or cards are all fun parts of the game, BarBEARian Battlegrounds’ strongest aspect is the player interaction. In general, the gameplay is a good mixture of both fighting and resource gathering, the challenge being to find a good balance between the two. As everyone starts with two glory tokens, with fewer players there aren’t enough of them to win the game through fighting alone, and players will have to invest in resource gathering at some point. This strategy only works with certainty in a game with the maximum four players. If the path of friendly farming bear is not to your liking, you can invade other players’ settlements and steal their resources or glory tokens. Finally, players can spend resources to buy glory tokens, seven of which are required to win.

They can buy specialist tokens that stay on the board and help with resource gathering or defence buy more dice, temporary or permanent alter dice values or buy special cards that make available actions more powerful. In general, though, the game doesn’t have too many restrictions and after several turns players will be able to generate enough resources to be able to buy pretty much anything they want. There are certain limitations to which dice outcomes can’t be used to gather resources. Afterward, players hide their action board behind a small screen (which conveniently also acts as a player guide) and assign dice to either attack a specific player, defend their village or gain some or all of three available resources – one of which is, of course, honey. The central mechanic is simultaneous dice-rolling by all players, where all results are visible. It also helps that the game itself is enjoyable, clever and brings a few interesting twists and turns into straightforward and family-friendly gameplay. The puns and the theme are so fun that it is easy to overlook them being nothing more than a thick coat of paint over a bluffing dice game. Add bonus points for wordplay and BarBEARian Battlegrounds begins to score particularly high. Therefore, add bears into the mix and you have an instant appeal. Those bears ate people, but they were small, cute and made funny noises so they were also adorable. How do you take the violent theme of pillaging barbarians and give it a family-friendly overlay? Designers Walter Barber and Ian VanNest have a perfect answer to that: the Ewok effect.

Barbearian battlegrounds