Beaver Creek

Despite debuting just a few short months ago, Beaver Creek immediately found a place in my otherwise cold, dead, heart. There are a few reasons I won’t mention, but one of the blatantly obvious reasons is beavers. The noble beaver, mascot and icon of Canada. I just love me some beaver. The game isn’t even Canadian, these are beavers Brazilian style.

Anywho… where to start? Let’s start at square one, with the box. The art is absolutely adorable, and the bottom of the box is actually the game board. It’s also small, about the size of an outstretched adult hand, making it super easy to bring along on an adventure, or even just a blind date. (Because if your potential partner doesn’t want to play a game, that’s a huge red flag.)

Then on to the components. There are two lengths of logs, with three different art designs on each. There’s nothing fancy with the logs, they are simple (but above-average quality) punchboard. There are two oversized wooden dice, that I’ll come back to in a moment. Lastly, the real stars of the game: the beavers. The beavers are wooden meeple, adorably screen printed on both sides. You have to place the beavers standing up, but if the damn falls, the weight of the tail ofter results in them landing cockeyed. I don’t really know how intentional that is, but a beaver lying on its tail is every bit as stable as on its feet. 

Since I’ve basically already started talking about gameplay, let’s back up a bit and look at that.

As I mentioned earlier, the bottom of the game box acts as the game board. There are five open spaces printed on the box/board and the game starts with beavers in two of them. Then, on their turn, each player rolls the two dice. One die determines what that player is going to place, and the second die determines how they do it. Each face of the first die has a beaver icon and log icon, and how many of each needs to be placed. That’s the boring part. The second die says HOW the player must place the logs and beavers. The options are:

• Place the logs using only your pinky fingers
• Place the logs using your fingers like scissors
• Play with your non-dominant hand
• Place one combination of beaver and log simultaneously
• Place the logs resting on the last log which was placed
• Place new logs touching only beavers

The goal of the game is to successfully place all of your logs into the beaver dam. Now, in many dexterity games with that sort of goal, you would expect to be penalized for knocking everything down. Right? Nope. How it works in Beaver Creek is that if you drop a log or beaver, or knock the dam down, anything touching the table gets discarded but everything else remains where it lands and can continue to be used. That means that using the box is more than just a cute aesthetic, which is very cool and somewhat rare. But don’t go thinking that a whoopsy gets you off scot-free. While the player that made the mistake doesn’t have to take any of the fallen logs, or anything like that, their opponents are all able to discard a log. Since the dam is inevitably going to be built up higher later in the game, which means the dam is easier to knock down later in the game, one player’s slip-up could be what wins one or more players the game. (Games resulting in a tied win remain a shared victory.)

The rulebook isn’t always perfectly clear, which I assume is because the company is Brazilian rather than a native English-speaking country, but the game is simple enough for that not to matter much. We actually managed to bugger up a few things, but it was no less fun as a result. There is also a simple, and unadvertised, solo mode which I played live on Twitch and you can watch the VoD on YouTube. Overall, Beaver Creek is a surprisingly delightful dexterity game, a genre of games I rarely enjoy. But I do love beaver. Oh, and as a completely separate note: did you know that the world’s largest beaver dam is right here in my home province of Alberta.

You can find Four Fun online at fourfun.games or on Facebook at facebook.com/fourfungames.