I love bears. Sarah loves bears. Bears, bears, bears. We use the term “polar bear” to describe our affinity for the cold and snow, we have all sorts of stuffed bears, and we live in the Shenandoah Valley – when I get a new license plate for my car, it will be the one for the park, which has a bear.

Suffice it to say, Sarah and I lost our minds when we saw Ursa Miner from Room and Board Games on Kickstarter back in May. So, of course we backed it. It just arrived this week, so we wanted to do an unboxing for you!

Ursa Miner is a tile laying game, designed by Michael Batista and Eli Kosminsky, where you play as bears that are mining honey! So here’s a quick look at the box, the components, and all that you’d want to check out with it.

The box! the art on the box is even a ton of fun to look at. Look at all of the BEARS.

Here it is! Look at all of the goodies that are jam-packed into the box. It looks great, doesn’t it? I love when games actually use the room that they’re given instead of having a big box with lots of extra space inside.

SO. MANY. TILES.

Here are the character cards for the bears. They even use the shapes of the specific meeples for the meeple spots – how cool is that? They are player aids too, which is pretty handy!

Look at these freaking meeples. LOOK AT THEM. They are so cute. Really small (my meathooks may have issues holding onto them, but I don’t care), but adorable. 

Did someone say tiles? I think someone said tiles. There are so many wonderfully delicious honey tiles that it really does make you want some honey.

Here are some of the “bonus cards” that you can play on your turn in order to cause events and make the honey cave work to your advantage. They look like a lot of fun and will add some variability to the game as well.

The only issue we’re having right now is getting it all back in the box – it’s a very precise process! But, as you can see, it looks great and we’re really excited to get it to the table here in February.

Game On!
Marti