Matthew BaileyGame 49 of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “13 Beavers” played with Toby(6) and Jack(9)
I bought “13 Beavers” largely because of the very striking design on the front cover and the fact that I hadn’t heard of it until I saw it in my local Waterstones. Nicola Asker did a good review of it a few weeks ago and I would definitely recommend checking out her review as well. So I went into “13 Beavers” with a good level of enthusiasm, and she was definitely right.
“13 Beavers” takes a very simple higher-or-lower concept that could have just been done as a basic card game where you turn over a deck of cards and guess if the next card will be higher or lower, earning some sort of tokens. Instead, it turns this idea into a tactile, fun, push-your-luck experience.
On the surface, I shouldn’t like “13 Beavers”, it’s a linear, move-around-the-board game, and it draws from ultra-mainstream game roots. But something about “13 Beavers” just works.
At the start of the game, each of you chooses a beaver and places it in a dam. On your turn, you simply have to guess if the next card in the deck will be higher than the previous card. If you guess correctly, you move your beaver to the next space. It is then your decision: are you going to continue, or are you going to dam? If you dam, you move your dam marker to your beaver’s position, and that becomes your new fallback point for subsequent turns. However, if you keep going and get it wrong, you go back to where your dam had been previously.
As you go around the board, there are special spaces that offer additional decisions. There’s a tempting cave that will take you from the start to the end, but to succeed, you must guess the exact number, otherwise, you face going back to the beginning. There’s also a really cool part where you can gain a fish that grants you a special ability. To do this, you use a magnetic fishing rod to pick up the fish. This magnetic fishing rod is completely unnecessary. This could have just been done with cardboard tokens, but its addition adds to the over-the-top production of this game, which is super fun. There’s an area where you encounter a wolf’s cave, and you have to find the sleeping wolf. If you do, it makes it easier for your opponents. There are also lava areas where you can’t stop; you have to push past.
Everything is super engaging and it takes 2 already tried and tested mechanics and amalgamates them into a fun compelling family experience.
The component quality of the game is extremely high for this type of game. All of the pieces are really nice wooden meeples. The board is of very good quality, the cards are excellent, the tokens are superb, and the magnetic pieces are great. The whole production has been dialled up to 11. The neon orange and striking blue aesthetic is what drew me in initially, and it’s truly marvellous.
“13 Beavers” is a really good game that I would not only recommend to children and families in general, but it’s also a really good birthday present for non-gamer children.
