Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River (2025, Osprey Games) is one of those rare tabletop experiences that is a river of contradictions.
It’s got a bumpy, long title that sounds more like a book than a board game. (This is not a surprise, given that Osprey is a publishing house that is a subsidiary of the company that first published the Harry Potter series.) However, when referred to as simply “Katmai”, my kids loved saying the word “KATMAI” to no one in particular. So, the game has a tough, wordy title, but a dope, borderline cool nickname.
Katmai is a two-player-only game about Alaskan brown bears taking up fishing spots along the Brooks River, which sounds peaceful, until it becomes an area control game that features moments that are, somehow, gently cutthroat, if that’s possible. The two bear card factions—all pulled from real bears living in the Katmai region of Alaska—feature bears with gloriously different names, like Popeye, Scare D Bear, Milkshake, and Snaggletooth, but the two factions feature mechanically identical card powers across the 12 cards in each player’s deck.
The strangest element of Katmai? It’s a fun game with a decent amount of setup variability—and it’s a game that no one at the house wanted to play a second time.
“No, That’s OK”
Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River is a two-player-only competitive area control game. Across a number of rounds—which, in my plays, was exactly three rounds each time—players use a random number of their 12 cards to play against seven river tiles to achieve the most “dominance” over their opponent against each river tile. After each player has played 10 cards, each river tile is scored individually. Whoever has the greater dominance (bear strength, a numeric value printed on cards and boosted or hurt by card powers) will place one of their “beeples” (bear meeples) on one of the four spaces on that tile.
When measured alongside previously placed beeples, a player’s bear placements may trigger scoring through one of the public milestones provided during setup. If the game doesn’t end early—when one player has a difference of four or more beeples along the river over their opponent—then scores are tallied based on the number of salmon (point) tokens placed on milestone cards.
Each player’s deck features the same mix of card strength and powers, albeit with different artwork and different bear names. Six of the 12 cards feature just a dominance number, between 2-4. The other six cards each have a single power; none of the powers is wild or hard to understand, but they are absolutely consequential. Each player only ever has two cards to choose from on a turn, so making the right selection from limited choices is one joy of the design by Peter Ridgeway (the same man who gave us Wildstyle, one of my favorite real-time games).
The other interesting mechanic here is the initiative (first player) marker. At the beginning of the game, one person will have the initiative, which forces that player to play one of their cards face-down to a tile before their opponent. They can choose to make the other player the initiative holder to begin their turn. This is because, like a lot of other area control games, playing last is often a major advantage. (Initiative can only change hands once per turn.)
Turns are quick. It’s been interesting to track a round to see where players will try to establish a river presence right from the jump. The choices are not exhilarating for core hobbyists; even my wife, a skilled gamer when she chooses to jump in for head-to-head affairs, found the agency here to be “just OK.” My eight-year-old was slightly more interested in what Katmai was trying to achieve…well, at least the first time he played.
The Winners Moved On
One of the scariest things I see as a game reviewer: the moment when a player wins a new game, then decides on the spot that they don’t want to play it ever again. Winner’s bias is real, so when a winner doesn’t want to feel that high again, I get worried.
My son won a play of Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River (my second, his first), and I asked if he wanted to try it again, maybe later in the weekend, giving him a chance to think about it before committing.
“No, that’s OK,” he said, and immediately ran upstairs to play Tenzi literally by himself. (To his enduring credit, my son knows what he loves!) He didn’t even want to talk much about Katmai, and then he didn’t ask to play it again, despite the box living on my kitchen counter for a few days after his first game.
Katmai was good, but it wasn’t memorable, save for the typically beautiful Osprey production. The bear images are gorgeous, drawn by Tom Lopez (Fractal: Beyond the Void). The setup variety is nice, with lots of different scoring milestones driving players towards winning different tiles in each play. And the player aid on the back of the rulebook can be used to teach the full game. (The overall manual is more than 20 pages long, strange given that this is a game I literally taught to an eight-year-old in less than 10 minutes. There is a lot of context regarding the Katmai Conservancy, the national park and nature preserve that serves as the basis for the game’s concept.)
I have really struggled to figure out who Katmai is for? In a world with hundreds of animal-themed games, Katmai fits for a twosome looking for a game they can play on a monthly or quarterly basis in about 20 minutes that isn’t too stabby, as long as they know this is not getting them 50 plays like games such as 7 Wonders Duel (or its newer, Lord of the Rings-themed evolution, Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth).
And, for the seasoned gamer looking for a beautiful game about brown bears…this and Barenpark might be the only games in the world that line up. Give Katmai a look if any of the above describes you and your gaming partner!
Add Comment