I’ve talked about a bunch of polyomino tile-laying games on this blog, from Project L to the more recent Frosted Blooms, and in those posts I’ve often said that I really enjoy poluomino tile laying games. I still suspect a lot of this joy comes from my background in Tetris. My mom was very good at Tetris, and she would mercilessly crush me when we played multiplayer, until I got my first job and with my first-ever paycheck as a teenager, I bought myself a GameCube and a copy of Tetris and practiced and practiced in my room until I could finally bury her in junk lines.

Take that, Mom.

But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to talk about Bärenpark.

In Bärenpark, players are trying to build the best bear park. Every player starts with one 4×4 entrance tile and one of the green enclosure tiles, the size of which depends on your player order. These green enclosure tiles are small attractions, like a food stand or a porta-potty. They can be one, two, or three squares large and come either in a straight line or in a small L shape. On the central board in front of all players, there’s also a bunch of small bear enclosure tiles arranged in stacks. Each of these enclosures are 4 squares large and each of the 4 types are in the classic Tetris tetromino-style shapes, and the highest point value tile is on the top of each stack. Lastly, covering nearly half of the entire supply board are the coveted large enclosure tiles, which are five or six squares large and worth a healthy chunk of points.

Your 4×4 entrance tile is littered with icons. There are green wheelbarrows, white cement trucks, and construction crews. Covering those icons earns you pieces of the corrosponding type. Cover a wheelbarrow and you gain a small attraction tile. Cover a cement truck and you gain a medium bear enclosure tile. Cover a construction crew and you get to take another 4×4 park tile to expand your zoo.

Each turn, players simply place one tile from their supply onto their park, making sure it’s adjacent to an existing tile. Then, if they covered any icons in their zoo, the collect the corrosponding rewards and the next player takes their turn. The game ends when someone manages to completely fill all four of their 4×4 park sections, including the one they started with.

In addition to the points you earn directly from the various bear enclosures you’re placing into your park, there are a couple of other scoring opportunities. First, whenever you completely fill one of your 4×4 park sections, you get to erect a bear statue. The first player to do this scores the most points, and the statues steadily decrease in value as the stack gets depleted. There are also three randomly selected objectives available every game. Sometimes these are straightforward, like being the first player to collect three Panda bear enclosures, or just have three orange tiles touching each other. Other times they’re much trickier, requiring specific spatial arrangements, such as placing three L-shaped green tiles end-to-end. These objectives make the spatial planning aspect of Bärenpark significantly more challenging than it first appears.

Because you’re earning points from so many different places, from the bear statues, from the various enclosures, and from the objectives, and the fact that each of those point sources are slowly diminishing, you’re constantly being pulled in different directions. Do you place the piece that will finish a 4×4 section and secure a valuable statue? Or is it more important to stretch off into a new area and cover two icons with a single placement? Maybe you don’t have a need for that 2×2 yellow tile, it doesn’t fit perfectly anywhere in your park right now, but it’s the highest point value piece available, and you can see that your opponent does have a perfect spot for it. Is it worth taking now? Also, if you place a tile and don’t cover an icon, do you have an extra piece in your reserve to play next turn? If you don’t, you need to burn an entire turn taking a single green tile, which is a huge disadvantage.

It’s managing all those little decisions that makes Bärenpark really fun to play for me.

I find Bärenpark infinitely replayable. Every time I sit down with this puzzle, I’m delighted. Even if the core game always feels fundamentally the same, there’s just something about this system that just keeps me coming back and brings a smile to my face every time I play. When the odd shapes just fall in your favor and you manage to always be one step ahead of your opponents, netting an extra point here and a small bonus there, it’s great. And then when you eventually stumble across the finish line and count everything up to find that you won by a mere 5 points, it feels incredibly gratifying.

Of course, the inverse is also true. Sometimes you get to the end of the game and discover your park is dotted with tiny single-square holes. Holes that you now need to spend round after round filling those holes with porta-potties, because apparently you thought it was more important to lay your 3 large enclosures in a weird shape just so they touched, all so you could earn that one objective, and your two opponents managed to achieve it before you did! That part of the game is much less fun.

But hey. Skill issue, right? I don’t know how, but I rarely come in 2nd in Bärenpark. I’m either absolutely crushing my opponents, or being crushed. There is no middle ground.

What I appreciate most about Bärenpark is how focused it is. If you like polyomino tile-laying games, Bärenpark is about as good as it gets. There’s nothing here to distract from the spatial puzzle. There aren’t any markets to manipulate, side mechanisms to explore, or layers of complexity piled on top of the core experience. This game is simply about taking tiles, placing tiles, and trying to make them all fit together as efficiently as possible.

If spatial puzzles are your jam and you haven’t played Bärenpark yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot.