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The battle for Bavianenberg has started, and it’s exactly as chaotic as a mountain full of ambitious baboons sounds.
Six colourful baboon clans are trying to climb as high as possible, because the higher they end up, the more points they’re worth at the end of the game. Simple enough. The catch is that every player is secretly supporting one of those colours, and keeping that secret is often just as important as moving your baboons into good positions.
That’s where Bavianenberg stops being a simple climbing game and starts becoming a guessing game. Every move tells a story. Sometimes you’re genuinely helping your colour. Sometimes you’re pretending to help another colour. Sometimes you’re making a move that looks completely ridiculous, only because you don’t want everyone at the table figuring out what you’re actually doing.
Meanwhile the mountain itself never sits still. Baboons get pushed away, others climb into empty spaces, and positions constantly change. A colour that looks strong one moment can suddenly disappear from the best spots, while another works its way toward the top. By the end of the game you’ll reveal your secret colour and find out whether your sneaky little monkey plan actually worked. Or whether you’ve spent the last thirty minutes helping someone else win.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Fréderic Moyersoen
🎨 Artwork: Denis Martynets
🏢 Publisher: White Goblin Games (Dutch version, review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
At the start of the game, every player receives a secret colour card. This determines which baboon clan they want to see succeed. The card stays hidden until the end of the game, and not every colour is necessarily controlled by a player, which makes the deduction side a little more interesting.
The centre of the game is the mountain itself. Baboon cards are arranged into a pyramid, creating the Bavianenberg. Every baboon belongs to one of six colours and has a strength value. Throughout the game, players manipulate the positions of these baboons while trying to improve the standing of their own colour without making it too obvious.
On your turn, the first thing you’ll do is remove a baboon from the mountain. To do that, you attack an adjacent baboon of another colour using a baboon with a higher value. Attacks can happen sideways or upward, but never downward. You can also combine the strength of multiple adjacent baboons of the same colour to remove a stronger target.
One rule we kept noticing during play is that baboons higher on the mountain aren’t quite as safe as they look. If you attack a baboon from below, its strength is reduced by one. Suddenly that impressive-looking baboon near the summit isn’t quite as secure anymore. When a baboon is removed, the attacker takes its place. If multiple baboons participated in the attack, the strongest one moves into the vacant position. Human baboons win ties if values are equal.
After that, the mountain starts to shift. Empty spaces are immediately filled by baboons climbing upward from lower rows. The strongest eligible baboon moves into the gap, which can create another gap below it, and then another one after that. One move can easily cause a whole chain of movement across the mountain.
Once every gap has been filled, one empty space remains on the bottom row. The active player then adds a new baboon from their hand. Throughout the game, new baboons enter the mountain while others slowly work their way upwards or disappear completely.
The deck contains two types of baboons. Regular baboons have values from 4 to 9. Human baboons range from 3 to 8. We largely ignored the human baboons during our first game. By the end of it, we were watching them almost as closely as the high-value cards. Their ability to win tie-breaks ends up mattering far more than their lower numbers suggest.
While all this is happening, players are trying to figure each other out. Every attack, promotion and placement potentially reveals information. Are they helping blue because blue is their colour? Or are they helping blue because they want you to think blue is their colour? That’s really what the game revolves around.
When all cards have been played, players reveal their secret colours and score points. Each row on the mountain is linked to scoring cards, with the higher rows offering better rewards. Players collect scoring cards based on how many baboons of their colour occupy each row. The player with the most points wins.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Bavianenberg is a card game, and White Goblin Games hasn’t tried to make it anything more complicated than that. Inside the box you’ll find baboon cards, scoring cards, and the secret colour cards. That’s pretty much it. The game is ready to go in a matter of minutes, and there’s something refreshing about that.
Denis Martynets clearly had some fun with these illustrations. The baboons are expressive, colourful and often carrying very human objects. You’ll find them holding balloons, checking mobile phones, carrying footballs and posing with various accessories. The human baboons stand out clearly from the regular ones, which helps both visually and mechanically.
Even once the mountain filled up, we rarely had to lean over the table to figure out values or colours. The six colours are easy to distinguish, and the card layout remains readable even when the pyramid becomes crowded. That’s the sort of thing you barely notice when it’s done well, but it makes a big difference during play.
The artwork never feels like it’s trying too hard to be funny. It’s just a mountain full of slightly ridiculous baboons doing slightly ridiculous things. That fits the game perfectly. And let’s be honest, a game called Bavianenberg probably doesn’t need gritty realism.
Our Experience
What stood out most during our plays was how much the hidden-colour system influenced the decisions around the table. On paper, Bavianenberg looks fairly straightforward. Move baboons, remove baboons, fill empty spaces, score points. In practice, we spent far more time wondering why people were making certain moves than thinking about the moves themselves.
Some of our favourite moments came from players deliberately sending mixed signals. We saw people helping colours they didn’t own, attacking colours they secretly supported, and making moves that looked questionable until the final reveal. When the colour cards eventually came face up, several turns suddenly made sense. Those reveals often generated more discussion than the final scores because everyone was trying to remember the little clues they’d missed along the way.
The mountain itself created plenty of memorable situations. Because empty spaces are constantly filled from below, every attack affects more than the card you’re targeting. We’d regularly focus on one part of the mountain only to realise that another colour had benefited from the resulting chain reaction. More than once, somebody celebrated a move before discovering they had improved another player’s position even more. Those were usually the moments people brought up afterwards when we talked about the game.
We also enjoyed how strength and scoring don’t always point you in the same direction. High-value baboons are useful because they can remove other baboons and influence the mountain, but points still depend on where your colour ends up at the end. That means a strong card isn’t automatically the best card for scoring, and a weaker baboon in the right row can matter just as much. More than once we found ourselves choosing between using strength now or trying to preserve a better scoring position for later.
The game doesn’t always feel fully controllable. The mountain changes constantly, which means long-term plans can disappear quite quickly. You might spend a turn setting something up, only to watch another player completely change the situation before your next turn arrives. That felt like part of the game’s personality, but it also means Bavianenberg rewards adapting to opportunities more than carefully building toward a fixed plan.
Player count also seemed to have a noticeable impact. With fewer players, it became easier to read what everyone was doing. With more players, there was more uncertainty, more suspicion, and generally more discussion around the table. Personally, I enjoyed the game most when there were enough players to keep everyone guessing without making the deduction feel impossible.
Our Thoughts
I think Bavianenberg’s strongest idea is the way it combines the mountain mechanism with the hidden colours. Every move has two meanings. There’s the mechanical effect on the board, and there’s the message it sends to the other players. That simple combination is what gives the game its identity.
For me, the mountain is the reason Bavianenberg works. Removing a baboon doesn’t simply create a new position. It changes several positions at once as cards climb upwards to fill the gaps. After a few games, we spent far more time looking at possible chain reactions than we expected when first reading the rulebook. There’s a satisfying moment when you stop looking at a move in isolation and start thinking about how the whole mountain might shift afterwards.
The hidden-colour system is a little less consistent. Without the bluffing, suspicion, and second-guessing, I found myself paying far more attention to the puzzle than to the people around the table. The game still works that way, but it feels less distinctive. Bavianenberg is at its best when players are willing to make slightly strange moves and keep everyone wondering what they’re really trying to achieve.
The possibility of kingmaking is worth mentioning as well. Once players begin identifying each other’s colours, somebody who is no longer in a strong position can still have a major influence on who wins. That’s not necessarily a flaw, especially in a highly interactive game, but it’s something groups should be aware of. Depending on the situation, those final turns can either feel satisfying or slightly frustrating.
After a few plays, it became clear that Bavianenberg doesn’t create variety through extra content. It creates variety through the people sitting around it. There aren’t alternative modes, variable powers, or major setup differences. Whether the game continues to surprise you will largely depend on how your group approaches the deduction and interaction side of things.
We also appreciated how quickly the game got to the table. Teach the rules, build the mountain, and you’re basically ready to go. Our hobby-gaming group never felt like the game was too simple, but I could also imagine teaching it to family members without much trouble. Not many games manage to work comfortably with both groups.
If you’re the type of player who likes planning several turns ahead, Bavianenberg may occasionally feel like it’s pulling the rug out from under you. The game is much happier letting players react, adapt, and take advantage of opportunities as they appear.
After a few games, I felt like I understood exactly what Bavianenberg was aiming for. It’s a light interactive game where the real fun comes from trying to work out what everyone else is up to while keeping your own plans hidden. The game became more enjoyable when people leaned into the hidden-colour aspect and started second-guessing each other’s motives. Once players began helping the “wrong” colours, accusing each other of hidden agendas, and trying to stay one step ahead of the table, the game really came alive.
If your group enjoys trying to read each other, making slightly suspicious moves, and occasionally causing a bit of monkey business, there’s a good chance Bavianenberg will earn a spot on your table. And that’s not a bad place for a bunch of baboons to end up.
📝 We received a review copy of Bavianenberg from White Goblin Games.
