Beaver gang card game – a story of two beavers. A Shaved beaver who uses Old Spice after a shower, and the stinky, hairy one. It seems they do not like each other. A story worth a cartoon… Remember these? Well, this game has something to do with angry beavers!
Introduction
Beaver gang – a card game with numbers, a memory type game with a little gambling, the risk involved. Each player has 4 face-down cards with numbers from 0 to 9. There are limitations on looking to your cards, so you basically never know all of your cards. And you got to collect as low numbers as possible, by remembering what cards you know and swapping them with other cards to minimize points collected. Simple, easy, quick and fun.
Beaver gang – a fast-paced card game for 2 to 6 players – very short and quick – usually around 10 to 15 minutes. This is a memory style game involving numbers with a little flavor of gambling and risk. Great for kids, for older people, or adults with kids. Playable as “intro” during game nights. Still quite popular despite its release date!
Let us get a little bit into more detail and evaluate the main aspects of the game.
Before the review – feel free to check our how to play beaver gang card game PDF summary.
Review details
The review will be covered in the following structure:
- Fun
- Replay value
- Art & parts
- Game price
Feel free to read the review details, or just scroll down to the review summary.
Fun
To start with, the game is very light, almost like a feather. You do not need to think much, and you can pretty much relax and have some fun. Everyone takes turns to pick up cards from the deck to swap the drawn card with any card in possession. No one knows if you picked up a good card, or you are bluffing to force others to try stealing your possibly good card. And when you swap, you cannot cancel it, you always put the card face up to the discard pile, and anyone can take it, in case you throw a good card!
There are 3 specific action cards that make this game a little more competitive and interesting. Magnifying glass (The Eye), The Beaver of Change (we call it the way we like it) and the Beaver Tower.
These cards provide various opportunities for players: Looking at one of your face-down cards, swapping your card with another player card of your choice (without looking at the cards) and picking up additional cards from the deck.
So you can always expect cards to be stolen from you, or you can swap a lot with others, to set yourself ahead from others. You can as well make this game conflict heavy, by focusing a single person and swapping cards with him, not necessarily to retrieve good cards, but to dump the bad ones, that always works for sure, but it can turn out either funny or with dissatisfaction, so be careful and do not overdo that.
Generally, the more people play it, the funnier the game seems to be. Playing 1 vs 1 is usually pretty…well… boring.
Replay value
Despite the fact that the game is pretty funny, you kind of want to shift to other games pretty soon. A one or two playthroughs per session is certainly enough, probably due to the simple and straightforward nature of the game.
For us, it feels that the game could have a little more action cards to be more…varying. Such as, swapping cards between other players (instead of yourself), or swapping your own cards to change their placement.
On the other hand, this game is very much adopted to different player types, great for kids, for elder people, or adults with kids and so on. If this would be more complicated, this universality aspect would certainly have less feel to it.
So we guess by nature for adults this game has less replay value, but for other players naturally more.
Art & parts
The quality of the cards is pretty good. We are playing with our deck of cards for a few years, probably hundreds of games and the cars are in good shape, even without card sleeves. So the quality is fine.
The art seems nice, it looks more like a comic book or a cartoon from the ’90s or 2000, but well, this is still unique and crafty. What was a great idea is to tell a little story about the beavers pictured on cards. They are like neighbors, very old or very young, who like to rival and fight with one another. The closer the numbers get to 0, the more dominant becomes the brown (nice looking, and probably smelling) beaver, the more numbers get towards 9, the stinky one (grey) becomes dominant.
As we previously mentioned, the game theme isn’t that dominant. This is just a card game based on numbers, the beaver topic has no relation to actual gameplay or immersion, this is just not that type of the game.
Beaver gang (1995) colorblindness review
Speaking about colorblindness review, we are glad to share that the game is colorblind-friendly. Since you only care about the numbers and a few action card symbols, who can be easily discerned even without paying attention to colors.
Colorblindness rating: A (Very good)
Price
And finally, the game is super cheap. It is super worth to own it, as the value you get is far exceed the price you pay. One of my grandmothers favorite game. I play it weekly with her. She is 87 years old! Do you want to see some of our gameplay? 😀 let me know down in the comments.