Wouter & Ymke 
Bears apparently need very few things. Bearfolk, on the other hand, seem to need binoculars, backpacks, rubber ducks, weather forecasts, fishing cabins and a secret supply of honey. In Bear Necessities, we’re following these bears as they travel through cities, mountains, deserts and waterside locations, meeting animals and collecting photographs of whatever they come across.
Those photographs become your tableau, which will contain only twelve cards by the end of the game. That doesn’t sound like much, and the first few cards are easy enough to place. Then you start wondering where that photographer should go, whether you really need another plant, and why you’ve been carrying the same card around for three rounds without finding anywhere useful to put it. The illustrations suggest something fairly light, but a few rounds in we were already arguing with ourselves over which spaces we could afford to fill. Bear Necessities will make its debut at Spiel Essen later this October, where Mojito Studios will have it at booth 3-N120.
👥 2-4 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designers: Johan Benvenuto & Gricha German
🎨 Artwork: Kerri Aitken
🏢 Publisher: Mojito Studios (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
A game of Bear Necessities lasts twelve rounds, during which each player builds a tableau of twelve cards in a four-column by three-row grid. Every card has one of four colours, each representing an environment: red for city, blue for water, green for mountain and yellow for desert. Cards also have one or two of five types: Bearfolk, building, item, plant and animal. Different cards score based on these colours, types and their positions within your tableau.
At the beginning of a round, everyone secretly chooses two cards from their hand. One is played into your tableau and the other is placed face down in your reserve. Everyone reveals and places their chosen card at the same time, resolves it and takes any victory points earned. You then pass the cards still in your hand to the player on your left and add your reserved card to the cards you’ve received from the player on your right.
After rounds four and eight, everyone will have run out of cards. You then decide whether to keep the card currently in your reserve or discard it, before the dealer brings everyone’s hand back up to five cards.
Your first card can go anywhere, but every card after that has to be placed orthogonally adjacent to something already in your tableau. Whenever you add a card, you activate that card first and then every card directly beside it, above it or below it, in whichever order you choose. Only the card you’ve just placed activates its neighbours, so those neighbouring cards don’t start another round of activations.
Some cards have goals. Each time one of these cards activates, you check whether you’ve met the requirement shown on it. If you haven’t, you use the effect above the line. Once the requirement has been met, you use the effect below the line instead. Completing a goal elsewhere in your tableau isn’t enough on its own. The card containing that goal still needs to be activated before you receive its completed effect.
Finally, there are bees. At the end of each round, the player who scored the fewest points that round receives a bee token. After round twelve, you count the bee hive symbols among your cards and multiply that number by the bee tokens you’ve collected. Add those points to everything you scored during the game and whoever has the highest total wins.
Artwork & Components
Bear Necessities is full of small scenes rather than generic pictures attached to scoring effects. There’s a bear cleaning windows, another taking photographs, a suspicious-looking spy, a football player and a collector sitting behind a table of little objects. Then there are animals, plants and everyday items such as binoculars, a weather forecast and a rubber duck. I mean, the rubber duck has two bee hives on it. Apparently it’s a very important duck.
The four colours make the cards easy to separate once your tableau starts filling up, and each colour also has its own symbol. The artwork takes up roughly the top half of a card, with the scoring information underneath. With twelve cards together, you end up with something that does resemble a collection of photographs from different places, even if you’re mostly staring at those photographs because you’re trying to work out where the next one should go.
Most of the box is cards. There are 94 of them, alongside 100 victory point tokens and 20 bee tokens. The victory points are cardboard honey jars in different denominations, while the bees are small yellow wooden pieces. We liked the bees in particular. They’re completely unnecessary from a practical point of view, but a pile of yellow wooden bees sitting beside someone who keeps finishing last is much more entertaining than a pile of cubes would have been.
Everything is easy enough to read once you know the symbols, although there can be quite a bit of information spread across twelve cards near the end. Even after several games, we were still noticing little details in the illustrations on cards we’d previously treated as nothing more than a way to score another few honey jars.
Our Experience
Bear Necessities was easy enough to get into, so our first game started fairly casually. We saw scoring opportunities, picked cards that seemed useful and started filling our grids. Halfway through, several cards we wanted to activate again were already stuck against an edge or completely surrounded. We’d happily filled every available space because, well, that’s usually what empty spaces are for. Here we’d basically closed the door on those cards ourselves.
Our later tableaux had noticeably more holes in them for much longer. If a card was already scoring well, nobody was particularly eager to put something next to it just because the space happened to be available. There were several turns where a card moved between two positions, was put down, picked back up and eventually ended up somewhere else entirely. More than once, one of us confidently pointed out the obviously better position for the other to notice a third option neither of us had considered.
The reserve created a different problem. At first, it was mostly somewhere to put the second-best card in our hand. As we played more, we started carrying cards forward because we had a particular position or combination in mind, sometimes putting the same card back into the reserve because the place we’d imagined for it still wasn’t ready. A few eventually landed exactly where we’d been planning and activated the neighbours we’d kept available for them.
Others followed us around until we had to admit that the tableau we’d imagined three rounds earlier no longer existed. Apparently letting go is an important skill, even for bears.
Then there were the bees. During our first games, they looked mainly like compensation for having a poor round. One player proceeded to collect several of them while staying behind on points, so nobody paid much attention. They were losing, after all. Then came final scoring, several bee hives were counted, and that supposedly losing player jumped ahead and won. The rest of us checked the scoring because we were fairly convinced something had gone wrong. It hadn’t.
We also played at different player counts. The cards circulate differently through the draft, but we didn’t find ourselves paying much more attention to the other tableaux as the number of players changed. Most of the time everyone was buried in their own four-by-three grid. Simultaneous selection meant we could usually get on with that at the same time. Occasionally everyone else was finished while one person was still staring intensely at cartoon bears and plants.
Our Thoughts
A twelve-card tableau doesn’t leave much room to correct yourself. That’s probably the part of Bear Necessities that stayed with us most. You can see exactly how much space you have from the beginning, but every card changes what those remaining spaces are worth. Something placed in the centre might get activated several more times, while a card on the edge may only have one useful neighbour left. Add colours, card types, goals and scoring conditions, and the card offering the most points right now can easily be less useful than something that leaves the rest of your grid in better shape.
The same card can be excellent in round three and fairly ordinary in round eleven. In the earlier rounds there may still be three spaces around it and plenty of time to meet a goal. Near the end, you might have exactly one position where the card even fits. By then, we’re rarely looking at a hand and agreeing on which card is best. What one of us happily passes can be exactly what somebody else’s tableau needs.
The reserve gives you some control over this, but it doesn’t guarantee that the other cards required for your plan will ever arrive. Sometimes you just have to give up on what you were building towards and work with what’s actually in front of you.
We’re already developing a few placement habits. Certain effects are obvious candidates for positions with several neighbours, and the middle of the tableau is valuable space. I can imagine those habits becoming more fixed with enough plays. So far, the different cards we’ve drafted have pulled our tableaux in different directions, but I’d be interested to see whether particular placement patterns start appearing too often after many more games.
We have a similar question about bees. We’ve seen a pile of them turn into a winning score, but not often enough to know how much you should deliberately build around them rather than simply taking advantage when the opportunity appears.
Most of the time, we weren’t paying much attention to the other tableaux. You can look at what another player needs and avoid passing them something particularly useful, but that wasn’t where our attention naturally went. If you want drafting to involve constantly watching what everyone else is collecting and trying to block them, Bear Necessities may feel too solitary.
The amount of calculation can also stretch the playing time. The rules are easy enough to follow, but someone determined to compare every possible placement, activation and future space can keep everyone waiting. For us, that calculation is part of why we enjoyed the game, but I’d be careful about introducing it to someone expecting a very light card game simply because the box says thirty minutes and has friendly bears on the front.
After our games, we were still comparing tableaus and pointing at spaces we’d filled too early, cards we’d held for too long and combinations we hadn’t noticed until it was too late. There was usually something specific we wanted to try differently in the next game, rather than simply wanting a higher score.
Bear Necessities will probably suit players who enjoy drafting and tableau building and don’t mind spending most of the game working on their own little puzzle. It’s more solitary and more calculation-heavy than the artwork might suggest, but for us there was enough variation in those twelve cards to keep pulling us back. We certainly weren’t expecting to spend this much time discussing where to put a rubber duck, but here we are.
📝 We received a copy of Bear Necessities from Mojito Studios.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? You can find Bear Necessities at Mojito Studios in Hall 3, booth N120.
You can also find all of our pre-Spiel ’26 coverage here.
