Barenpark - First Play!

12th June 2022

Sunday evening is here and we're logged into Board Game Arena​ for a night of gaming.
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Does a bear lay tiles in the woods, who knows? What I can tell you is that a bear definitely does lay tiles in the park thanks to Barenpark: A tile laying game about building a park for bears and bears only!

Caveat: we've only ever played Barenpark digitally.

What's in a game?

• Game boards: All boards feature a 4x4 grid, 6 of these 16 spaces will contain 6 icons taken from a combination of 4 different type of icons and finally, one other space will contain a 'pit' space. The remaining 9 spaces are blank.
  Boards come in 2 flavours; starting and standard.
• Tiles: Barenpark uses a number of tetromino style tiles, although many tiles are much bigger or smaller than standard 4-space tertromino tiles. Barenpark has 3 types of tile.
  Green tiles: These tiles display different facilities that would be found at a park such as toilets, playgrounds etc. Green tiles score no points.
  White tiles: A white scoring icon indicates which tiles are white tiles. White tiles represent housing for game's 4 different types of bears.
  Each of the types will have 7 tiles of varying VP value from 1-7.
  Orange tiles: Like white tiles, orange scoring icons indicate which tiles are orange tiles and these represent enclosures for the 4 different types of bears.
  Unlike white tiles, there are only 3 of each type of orange tile, they also have a varying VP value, only from 6-8 instead.
• Bear statue tokens: There are 16 of these are round tokens and are numbered 1-16 which is also their VP value.

Barenpark's art is fairly minimal but effective. It's nothing to write home about but is perfectly functional.
Tiles display artwork themed to their type, so the green tiles feature a portaloo for a toilet, a playground for a play ground and so on.
The white and green tiles show buildings and habitats pertinent to the type of bear they represent. E.g., the polar tiles appear glacial.

There are only a few icons in the game and they are easily learnt. They are also colour coded, thus the wheelbarrow icon - which is green - represents green tiles, thus white cement trucks are for white tiles and orange excavators are for orange.
The work crew icon represents construction crews which is not related to tiles.

One slight criticism here is that while there are green, white and orange tiles, some tiles which are coloured green will actually be white or orange tiles, there are also some glacial blue tiles which are actually orange.
It's a minor quibble, but players will need to remember that a tile's colour is based on its scoring icon. This could have been improved by using unique colours.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Game boards: Randomly give each player a starting board.
  Take all the standard gaming boards and shuffle them into 2 equal face-up stacks in the central playing area.
• Tiles: Sort the tiles by type and put them out in the central playing area face-up as per the player count.
  White and orange tiles should be arranged with the highest value tile being placed at the top and descending in value. This means as more and more tiles get taken, the remaining point scoring tiles decrease in value.
• Bear statue tokens: Put out these tokens, again, the player count will determine which tokens are used. They should put out in numerical order.
• Determine a starting player: The starting player should take a 1-space green tile from the supply (In other words take a portaloo tile!) and place it in their playing area, NOT on the board. All other player should take 2 or 3 space tiles as per the player count rules.

On to play
In Barenpark, players complete to create the best bear park ever. Players achieve this by placing tiles on to their boards which in turn allows them to draft more tiles and boards.
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Barenpark uses a traditional turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progress to the player on their left.
During the active player's turn, they must perform the following actions.

• Play tile: The active player must play one tile from their personal playing area if they can. Tiles can be placed anywhere except on a pit space and can go across multiple boards provided there are enough spaces, tiles may be rotated and flipped as desired. Obviously tiles must fully fit on the available board spaces and cannot go over other tiles.
  First tile: The first tile a player puts down can be anywhere on their player board. Subsequent tile placements must adjacent to a tile already on the board.
  Passing: If the active player does not have a tile available or cannot place a tile because it doesn't fit in any current space; they then must take a green tile (Of their choice.), this immediately ends their turn.
• Draft: After the active player has placed a tile on their board, if they covered any icons, then they draft tiles and/or board as pertinent. If multiple icons are covered by a single tile placement, then all icons are resolved.
  Green wheelbarrow: Every one of these icons covered allows the active to draft a green tile.
  White cement truck: A white tile may be drafted.
  ​Orange excavator: A orange tile may be drafted.
  Construction crew: Covering this icon allows the active to draft a new game board by taking a board from one of the two available stacks and adding to their existing player board.
  The new board must be placed adjacent to a board already in play in the same orientation. A player is limited to a total of 4 boards for their park but may create a park of any shape within that limit, they can be placed in a line or a 2x2 grid or a t-shape or whatever.
• Take bear statue: Now the active player checks to see if all of the 15 spaces on any of their game boards have been completely filled with tiles - except of course, for the pit space.
  If any board has been filled, then the active player takes the highest value bear statue token and places it on the empty pit space on that board, thus finally completing it.
• Next Player: Play now proceeds to the player on the left.

Endgame
When any player completes their 4th game board, that is; collects their 4th bear statue, then the endgame is triggered.
​All other players now have one more turn of play and then the game  goes to scoring.
Players add together the value of all tiles played and bear statues placed on their game boards.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
Barenpark is a smart blend between easily understood, accessible rules, meaningful decisions and optimising gameplay. The game is something of a race to get the highest scoring tiles and bear statue tokens first and this can put players in something of quandary.

For the most part, players will want to draft white and orange tiles as often as possible because they score the points. They also cover more of the board and thus potentially draft more tiles. This is particularly true of orange tiles.
It means that players should be looking to cover icons with their tiles placements as effectively as possible to gain more tiles. Using an entire turn just to gain a green tile is not particularly efficient.
Having said that, greens are not bad tiles, sometimes getting green tiles is a useful move, those 1-space portaloos can fill in pesky gaps on a board, working towards getting bear statues.

Talking of bear statue tokens.
Sometimes it's worth taking a less efficient tile just to complete a board and gain a higher scoring token before another player. This is all of course contextual and dependant on the situation.

There's definitely a small degree of higher level of play going on here that comes from watching other players turns and trying to anticipate their next moves. With limited numbers of white and orange tiles, knowing which tile another player might go for gives you the option of employing a denial strategy against them or beating them to the punch for a token.

This brings me to the one criticism I have. When playing Barenpark in some circumstances it sometimes felt like that if one player got 'ahead' they tended to stay ahead.
By ahead I mean managing to fill spaces on the board before other players. This is most apparent when drafting bear statue tokens. At times you can see that a player will complete one of their boards before you and claiming the better scoring token, then they'll also be ahead for the next board and claiming the token ahead of you again.
Of course it's possible to re-prioritise and change which board you're trying to complete but since Barenpark has fairly linear gameplay (By which I mean you can only expand you tiles into areas where you already have tiles.), this can be tricky, although the endgame rules where players get an extra turn after whoever finished it probably goes some way to alleviating this.

I think Barenpark is a good, if unremarkable game that feels a little 'bland' or functional and is a little on the light side of this style of tile-placement game but I don't see that bad thing.

But quibbles aside, if you want a solid, tile-placing game that's not-too taxing but still engaging, Barenpark is a good choice.
Barenpark's accessibility and 'lightness' means means it's a good choice for a gateway or entry game.