Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River – Design Diary

Hear from designer Peter Ridgeway all about the process that brought our new board game Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River to life...

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This is the story of how Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River was created. 

The origin 

In March of 2020, the U.S. went into lockdown as COVID-19 spread to our shores. During this unique time, my wife and I found ourselves playing a lot of board games with just the two of us. We discovered that many of the four-player games in our game library didn’t play as well with only two players, and we began to truly appreciate the robust player interaction offered by games designed specifically for two players. In addition, the lockdowns made it nearly impossible for me to play test a game with anyone other than my wife, so I decided to make the most of the situation and set about to design a two-player game. My goal was to design a “thinky,” competitive game that optimized player interaction, offering players lots of ways to hinder or influence each other’s strategy. I also wanted a game that was easy to learn but had plenty of nuance and subtlety in the strategic choices it presented.   

Inspiration came in the form of a game that I had designed years earlier but was never completely satisfied with. It was a real-time lane battler game where one player was laying siege to a medieval wall while another player was defending it. The action was driven by cards that had varying numbers of soldiers on them. Players simultaneously drew these cards from their own draw pile and placed them along different segments of the wall. At the end of a round, if the attacking player had more soldiers at a particular wall segment than the defending player, that segment of the wall was damaged. If any segment was completely destroyed by the end of the game, the attacker won; otherwise, the defender won. 

There were many things I liked about this game design, but in the end, I scrapped the project. However, I’ve found that certain elements of scrapped projects often find their way into new projects, and that’s exactly what happened here.  

Building on the most enjoyable aspects of the siege game, I kept the lane battler concept and added area-control and pattern-building mechanics. I also dropped the real-time action in favor of a more contemplative turn-based game. Next, I needed a theme that fit these basic mechanics. I had spent some time in Alaska, and I remembered watching brown bears that had gathered at a river to fish for spawning salmon. Alaskan brown bears are very charismatic creatures that have their own unique personalities, and their social hierarchy creates lots of interesting drama. I knew right away that this drama would make an interesting theme for a board game. I wanted the game to feature the actual bears of Brooks River, and I chose to include bears that I felt had the most interesting personalities, as well as those that were most famous or most dominant. I added special abilities to some of the bear cards, which allowed players to influence their opponent’s cards.  

Below are examples of bear cards from the first prototype alongside the final versions: 

Another crucial component of the game is the river, where players can place their bear cards to compete for dominance on certain segments of the river. I decided to use a modular layout for the river as a way to increase the game’s variability and replayability. Each river tile is divided into four quadrants, with each quadrant displaying a specific river feature, such as waterfalls, eddies, shallows, rocks, or deep pools. These quadrants represented “fishing spots” that the bear meeples can occupy to catch salmon.  

Below are two of the river tiles from the first prototype alongside some from the final version: 

The main goal of the game is for players to occupy the best combination of fishing spots that enable them to catch the most salmon. I also developed objective cards, which award a certain number of salmon tokens to players based on specific combinations of fishing spots that are occupied. The more difficult it is to satisfy an objective, the more salmon tokens a player will earn.   

Game development 

By November of 2020, I had completed my first working prototype. The first few play tests yielded promising results. The basic mechanics of the game were solid, and many of my design goals were achieved with this first prototype. The rules were simple and easy to learn, and there was lots of direct player interaction. However, some of the special abilities on the cards needed to be tweaked to create more interesting choices for players. Likewise, some of the objective cards needed to be adjusted to optimize gameplay. I developed five more iterations of the game before I was satisfied that special card abilities and the objectives were dialed in. 

Another design challenge involved turn order. In the earliest version of the game, one player was chosen to be the “starting player,” and during each turn, the starting player always played first, followed by the other player. After a few play tests, it quickly became clear that the player who played second often had an advantage. They were essentially playing the game with more information than the first player. To minimize this, I tried alternating turn order with each new round. But the game is usually played in three rounds, which means the turn order was still unbalanced. Next, I changed the rules so that cards are played face-down, and once both players have played a card, both cards are turned face-up simultaneously. This hid the identity of the cards, so that the second player could not know in advance what card the first player had played. This improved the balance of the game, but the location of where the first player placed their card was still valuable information that gave the second player an advantage. 

Finally, I decided to add an “initiative token” to the game. The player with the initiative token had two options: They could play first and keep the token, or they could give the initiative token to the other player and force them to play first. This turned out to be the perfect solution. This not only balanced the game, but it also created another interesting strategic decision for players.  

In October of 2021, I started graduate school, and I paused all game design work for about a year. In December of 2022, I resumed the Katmai project. By then, the harsher realities of COVID had faded from view, and I was able to bring the nearly final prototype to more play-test groups, and the feedback I received was positive. The game had achieved the strategic nuance that I was hoping for. With most of my previous game designs, I found myself getting tired of a game after about 50 play tests or so. But Katmai continued to enchant me with interesting new scenarios each time I play tested it.  

Below is an image of the full prototype alongside a final copy of the game: 

In August of 2023, I pitched Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River to Rhys ap Gwyn of Osprey Games. We played the game together at Gen Con. Rhys immediately asked for a prototype. Before the end of August, Rhys reached out to me to say Osprey was interested in publishing the game. In October, we met to discuss game development and art direction. We agreed that we wanted the playing cards to feature beautiful artwork that looked like watercolor or oil paintings. Several possible artists were considered, and in the end, Osprey commissioned Tom Lopez, who creates beautiful, dream-like illustrations of wildlife and landscapes. Working from photographs of the real-life bears of Brooks River, Tom skillfully captured the personalities of the bears in his card illustrations. His 24 illustrations, handsomely displayed on tarot-sized cards, are truly the centerpiece of the game—a visual delight for players as they strategize their next move. 

While the game rules are simple and accessible, Rhys felt that the objective cards might be a little overwhelming for first-time players. So, we set about creating an alternative set of objective cards that would allow new players to pick up the game a little more easily. These objectives focused on creating specific spatial patterns with the players’ beeple (bear meeple) placements along the river. To our surprise, we discovered that these new objectives were just as challenging as the original objectives, while at the same time being more accessible to new players. We felt this was a positive outcome. We decided to include these new objectives on the backside of the original objective cards, giving players two different game modes to choose from.  

It was important to us that the final version of the game be an accurate and faithful representation of the actual Brooks River bears, so Osprey contacted the Katmai Conservancy about collaborating on the development of the game. The Katmai Conservancy is a nonprofit organization that supports the preservation of Katmai National Park and is responsible for organizing Fat Bear Week to increase public awareness of the park. We were grateful that the Conservancy was excited about our little game project, and they carefully reviewed the game to ensure that no element of the game misrepresented the famous bears. They also provided us with educational information about the national park, which we included in the rulebook. 

The Launch 

Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River was previewed at PAX Unplugged in December 2024. The Osprey Games team headed to Philadelphia for the East Coast’s premier event devoted to tabletop gaming culture, hosting an estimated 30,000 attendees and 350 different vendors. Alongside selling early copies, the team ran demos of Katmai to the public for the very first time ahead of its release in February 2025. The show was the perfect opportunity to introduce an entirely new audience to the game, and it had an amazing reception from newcomers and fans of Fat Bear Week alike. 

Born out of the COVID lockdowns, my design work on Katmai was a much-needed comfort during an unprecedented time of social isolation. From conceptualization to final production, each stage of game design was a true joy. In the end, I hope I have created a game that delights people with interesting strategic choices and, more importantly, enjoyable social interactions.  

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Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River is out in the US & UK now.

Order today.

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