Bear Valley Review

If you’ve ever played a Carl Chudyk game, such as Innovation or Impulse, you might think you know what to expect with Bear Valley. Or maybe you don’t. Mr. Chudyk designs some very unique, singular rules sets that have a sort of vague Chudyk-ian feel that’s sort of hard to lay a finger on, but if you know his games then you’ll know what I am getting at here. Bear Valley is a Chudyk-ian take on an adventure/exploration concept and as you might anticipate it’s kind of weird, occasionally awkward, quite rules-heavy and frequently compelling. I’m not sure it hangs together as well as some of his past work but it’s definitely an interesting and worthwhile jaunt.

As usual for the Chudyk style, it is a small format card game with just a couple of tokens and additional material. You get 15 valley cards that set up the valley and river around which you will explore and 79 wilderness cards that will reveal your explorer’s immediate surroundings. Starting out from a base camp, your goal is to move your explorer token through the wilds to another remote camp. On your turn, you will lay out wilderness cards matching up exits and trying to find pathways while also avoiding bears and dead ends. If you play the advanced game, there is also equipment that you can find and special areas, along with character abilities to help (or hinder) your trek through the forest.

Of course this isn’t a simple walk in the woods. There is this sort of strange timekeeping mechanic, whereby each card you explore or traverse is assigned a time. Earlier in the day it’s safer, later in the day it’s easier to get lost or attacked by a bear. It has to do with the time of day compared to the number of exits on the card you are exploring. It’s kind of unintuitive, but in terms of the setting and what the mechanic is attempting to depict it works- and it gives the game a nice push-your-luck element.

There are also rules limiting movement, like how you can’t move through another player. This complicates things, but in the advanced rules there are gold tokens that you can pay to circumvent the restriction. It kind of doesn’t make sense, really. The advanced rules add a lot to the game- exploring caves, riding canoes down the river, using machetes to chop through the brush, finding rope to drop down from an overhanging bridge to a lower level. The detail level is higher, but the additional rules weight might be off-putting to some players. I prefer the advanced game because I like the detail, but keeping track of all of the card effects, character abilities, and limitations feels heavy for a game of this overall weight.

In a few ways, Bear Valley reminds me of Goldland, a great Wolfgang Kramer exploration game that never got released in the United States. And I really like the “real world” adventure feel of the setting- there’s some minor fantastical elements at work in the advanced game, but mostly it’s about regular folks in the woods. Because of that, I tend to like Bear Valley probably more than I ought to given that it feels a little rough around the edges and maybe a little too plump with rules.