Bärenpark’s first expansion The Bad News Bears is good news for fans of monorails and grizzlies

Phil Walker-Harding’s delightful bear park-builder Bärenpark is getting its first major expansion, bring a trio of optional modules to the game later this year. More importantly, that means more bears!

Bärenpark: The Bad News Bears expands the scope of the tile-placing game to span across five park boards, making room for Bad News Bears’ headline feature: a monorail. (What’s it called? Monorail!)

The 3D monorail runs above the park, supported by pillars needing to be spaced the right distance from each other. Whenever a green park tile is added to a board, the player can also add a monorail tower. Once two towers have been placed, the player takes the top monorail tile from a central stack and adds it to their park – the monorail tiles decrease in value, so the earlier they’re built, the more they’re worth.

The second module brings a new type of bear to the parks. Grizzly bears take up a suitably spacious amount of room on a board, filling six spaces for the massive mammals. The grizzlies can be gained by swapping a green park tile and an animal house for the bears, but reward the extra space needed with one of the most valuable tiles when it comes to victory points.

The third and final module is more straightforward, simply adding extra objectives to the game’s offering of goals that can be shuffled with the base game’s stack.

The Bad News Bears doesn’t massively change Bärenpark’s easy-to-grasp loop of placing one tile each turn, but looks set to shake up the game with the option to mix one, two or all three of the modules at the same time.

Bärenpark: The Bad News Bears will be released this August. A price is yet to be announced.