Bears Vs Babies

7th September 2021

​Tuesday night gaming in Woking at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club concluded with Bears Vs Babies!

We all know bears are dangerous wild animals, but few realise that natural enemy of bears... are babies and that's where Bears Vs Babies comes in, a completely true, completely educational card game about bears... and that's a fact!

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What's in a game?

• ​Cards: There are 107 cards in the game that come in 3 types.
  Body parts: Used to construct your bear-army, these include bear-heads.
  These cards will display numbers and the heads will display numbers in 1 of 3 colours, they will also have 'stitching' to show how they connect to other body parts.
  Babies: nemeses of bears everywhere! Babies come in 3 types, green, blue and red or land, sea and sky.
  Other: Special cards used to modify bears.
• Playmat: This cloth playmat has a spaces for all 3 types of baby, 3 stacks of cards and a discard pile.
• Furry box: No, this is still a gaming website. Bear Vs Babies comes packaged in a furry box.

See, I said... a furry box.

The cards are the quality you'd expect from cards.
The playmat is made of cloth andtrictly speaking, it's not necessary, but it's a nice touch.
Finally; the furry box, which is a box and furry...

The game's artwork is bright, colourful and brash, exactly what a game like this needs.

What iconography the game has is pretty easy to understand.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Deal a bear-head card to each player, shuffle any remaining bear-heads into the deck.
• Give the deck a shuffle and create 3 roughly even face-down decks on the playmat.
• Deal 4 cards to each player, if any of these cards is a baby, put that card face-down into it's assigned space on the playmat and draw another card, repeat if necessary. All players must have 5 cards at the game start.
• Determine first player.

On to play
​The objective in Bears Vs Babies is to accumulate babies cards by errr eating them? This is done by building bear/monsters from the body part cards and chomping down on those babies! The active player has 3 choices in their turn.

• Actions: The active player may perform 2-4 actions in their turn dependent on the total number of players. Each action allows them to perform one of the following.
  Draw: The active player may draw a card from any of the draw decks into their hand. If that card is a baby card, it must be placed face-down on its corresponding space; it still counts as an action.
  As these face-down stacks increase, they start becoming baby armies!
  Play: The active player may put a card down face-up in their playing area to create monsters. A monster's first card must always be a head, this is the start of their bear army. Torsos can be attached to heads and limbs to torsos and so on, special cards will attach to certain body parts, a hat will go on a head for example.
  Players may have more than one bear/monster in play at a time - it wouldn't be much of an army otherwise!
  The coloured number on the bear's head determines which type of baby it fights and the combined value of all the numbers determine its strength.
  Bear-heads are considered all colours.
• Provoke: If the active player decides to provoke, the following occurs.
  Actions: No actions are taken during a provoke.
  Choose baby army: The active player chooses one of the armies and turns those cards face-up and calculates that armies total value, all the players must now fight this baby army.
  Fight: Every bear/monster of every player that matches the colour of the revealed baby army must join the fight against it. Compare the combined value of all the baby cards revealed to the combined value of all the bear/monsters participating in the fight; the highest value wins.
  Bear/monster win: The player who had the highest valued bear/monster army among the players gets to eat the babies, that is keep the baby cards.
  Next, all bear/monsters that participated in the fight are discarded!
  Babies win: In this case all the participating bear/monsters are discarded and the baby army is also discarded. Say goodbye to those points!
• Dumpster dive: This is the 3rd and final choice a player can make. The following occurs:
  Actions: No actions are taken.
  Dumpster dive: The active player takes a card of their choice from the discard pile. Taking a baby card, means putting it on it's relevant face-down stack.
• Once a player has completed their turn, play proceeds to the player to their left.

Endgame
Once all 3 draw decks have been depleted, the game is over.
Players count the value of all the baby cards they've collected.
Point are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
Bears Vs Babies is a pretty straightforward game that's easy to learn and comes with an interesting wrinkle: Deciding when to provoke a baby army (Words I never thought I'd type!) has some genuine strategy to it.
Obviously, players will want to provoke when they have the strongest monster army to beat a baby army - that's how points are accumulated. But there are some other plays that can be made.

It pays to watch what other players are doing and trying to gauge what baby cards have been put into their respective stacks.
If a player knows that a baby army is small for example and another player has a strong monster, provoking the baby army will essentially waste that monster, especially if the provoking player won't be involved. Additionally, provoking a strong baby when not being involved will trash both the baby army and the other players' monsters.

But this is also where the game falls down, constantly having discard your monsters as you build them up can feel frustrating, especially when it happens several times in a row. It feels so counterintuitive. It turns an average, light, filler game into a frustrating experience.