Pop CultureSeptember 11, 2017

Review: Crowdfunded card game sensation Bears vs Babies is almost Unbearable

Guest writer

Kickstarter isn’t only the domain of backpack and fidget spinner innovators; it’s also good for indie board and card game makers. Pitched as a kid friendly card game built around vicious bears and violent babies, Bears vs Babies won some hard earned dollars from Douglas Moore. What’s his prognosis?

Hype is one hell of a marketing tool. After the roaring success of his original kickstarter, Exploding Kittens, creator Elan Lee returned with Bears vs Babies. The pitch was cool enough to raise a staggering $3.2 million. And since November of last year, backers like myself have been waiting for it. Then last month, it arrived. We opened up our fluffy copy, gave it a few plays aaaaaand… It’s… okay I guess?

The fluffy box is a cool gimmick that’s nice to the touch. Two to five players draw a hand of cards (monster parts) that they use to assemble bears. Over time, three stacks of babies build up. Players can provoke these horrors to get into a brutal fight with your bears. All of this makes for a cool concept. In theory. In practice, what we end up with is an exercise in frustration.

It’s really the little things that bother me about BvB. The main action of the game has players playing bear parts from their hand and drawing new ones. If you’re wondering about the three deck piles, it’s all the same. The game just puts a weird emphasis on splitting the deck into piles to add to the randomisation of the deck. You can draw a whole range of body parts, but this is also where the babies come from. If you do draw a baby, it goes into the middle rather than your hand (this loses you one of your actions for the turn).

Given you need to split your allotted actions between drawing and playing cards, you can take several turns assembling your bears. While a bit easier in a two player game (with four actions per turn), this seems oddly grindy for a shuffle-and-play kinda game. As for the cards themselves, they really are the main draw of BvB. True to the humour given to the title by Matthew Inman (the comic artist behind The Oatmeal), the concepts here are absolutely insane. You need to start a bear with a head, so you can expect grizzly bears, panda bears etc. But then you get a unicorn head. Then a barracuda. Then a pterodactyl. This says nothing of the body parts though, such as ‘which is also a tank’. Almost no two body part are the same, at least at first glance.

In order for your beasties to kill a baby army, the power of its parts must match or exceed the babies. So you’d expect a chainsaw arm to far outpace the power of a horrific many-dildo-wielding appendage. But noooo. All ‘arm’ pieces accrue you one power to your bear, a pattern that holds true for all body part types, even heads. Another minor point is that all monsters are built the same. There’s no weird arm that splits off into two more arms, or a robot leg that has five tool points or whatever. Despite the extremely creative and frankly hilarious graphics, the mechanics of those cards are simply not there.

Now I can understand this balance-wise. If everyone draws from the same deck, having a vast array of power levels between cards would be an awful experience (lookin’ at you, Munchkin). Many games are able to offset this sort of thing by introducing a resource system. This makes players spend more time and energy on powerful cards. Maybe these cards could exist, and cost more ‘actions’ to play? But no such system is in place here. In fact, the idea of going to draw cards, and having them be babies, wedges the fun of drawing cards between a boring necessity and a waste of time. Not to mention the parts that do exist must be affixed in certain ways. No three-headed turbo bears in BvB.

So how do we win this monstrosity? Well when the last card is drawn from the deck, players count up how many baby points they have. Whoever has the most wins. There are just a few problems here as well. Having a game end after the last card is drawn means that you will see every card in the game… on the first playthrough. And as we’ve mentioned, none of them are mechanically unique (except of course for the few ability cards). Having all cards being drawn isn’t particularly awful, if the order they are drawn in would be meaningful. But the blandness of the cards means after your first play, consider this content consumed.

This end condition is further compounded by the ability to dumpster dive for cards in the discard. And trust me, playing the barracuda head for the third time only increases the monotony. All of these issues sort of weave into each other. And as much as I want to hear the argument “Bro its just a romp about killing babies with bears, who cares” I would tell you no one chooses to play casual football with a wet bag of meat.

I too want to have light, fun titles in my collection for newer players. But Bears vs Babies is not one of them. When this hits retail, I suggest you play someone else’s copy. Once.

The lovely gaming post was brought to your bleeding eyeholes by Bigpipe, the most intense baby in Babyburg.

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Pop CultureSeptember 10, 2017

Common Sense is the reality show New Zealand needs to make next

Calum Henderson

Production editor

Calum Henderson watches Common Sense, a reality show that asks real people for their real reckons on current events.

Who hasn’t watched the vox pops on the news and thought: these random people on the street should have their own show? In Australia, that dream has become a new reality series called Common Sense.

A spinoff of the popular British format Gogglebox, which takes viewers into a variety of households to watch and discuss highlights of the week’s television, Common Sense goes inside a range of different workplaces to get a true blue Aussie take on the week’s news and current events.

Topics range from proper news (Sydney terror raids, a bike lane vandal on the loose in Melbourne) to classic clickbait (“a study has found housewives are more likely to cheat on their spouses…”). Sometimes even New Zealand gets a look in, like when Jacinda Ardern infamously had her child-rearing intentions brought into question on The AM Show.

“If you’re an employer you need to know that type of thing from the women you’re employing,” Mark Richardson had argued. “No you don’t… idiot,” responded Sydney marketing consultant Steve. In Melbourne, tech creative Helen had an even more succinct response: “F*** you,” she sighed while watching the clip.

Not everybody was so forthcoming in support for the Labour leader. “The reality is when you’re up at 2 and 3 in the morning and little Freddy has gastro you can’t then be running the country,” pointed out one of the ‘Bra and Swimwear Ladies’, a trio of Victorian bra-fitters spookily similar to Kath and Kim’s posh shopkeepers Prue and Trude.

“You know what I want to hear from politicians?” asked mulleted man-with-a-van Brett. “Their policies – that’s it.” Fellow removalist Laurence, who looked like he could be Slash in a Guns N Roses tribute band, agreed. “We’ve just had a senator breastfeeding in the Senate while dropping a bill like a boss.” The pair’s animated discussions of any topic invariably stray off-topic, and as such are a regular highlight of the show.

The Common Sense cast is well-chosen, though the show could probably stand to be a bit more racially diverse – only one of the ten workplaces includes any non-white commentators (the Chinese-Australian Yip family, fruit and veg market sellers from New South Wales). But from the butchery in Galston to the hair salon Kogarah and the retirement village in Keysborough, it’s a mostly likeable and entertaining selection of Aussies to pass the time with.

Like spending time with your actual friends, the topical conversations are punctuated by snippets of inane, sometimes bizarre small talk. After the Jacinda Ardern debate we dropped back in on Helen and work mate Sarah discussing the virtues of Vegemite. “Do you know what my dad used to do? Vegemite soup,” said Helen. At the market, Trudi found a bit of turmeric that looked like a rabbit.

The more you get to know the different personalities, the funnier these kinds of moments become. At times the show can also be unexpectedly heartwarming. In this episode, the usual trio from the rest home was down to two – 92-year-old Jean had been in hospital with a bad cold. “Let’s hope she’ll be with us again, because we do miss her,” said Ted. “Here, I’ll pour you a cup of tea,” offered Aileen. (Later, during a conversation about puberty, Aileen came out with the line of the episode: “I don’t think I knew I had a vagina until I was about 21!”)

While the idea of a local version of Gogglebox always sounded good, the truth is there is probably not enough New Zealand television worth talking about to make it sustainable. But there is never any shortage of news to discuss, and with the right talent a Kiwi Common Sense would go great guns. The only question is, who’ll make it?

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