We're not entirely sure why Format Games have given this game the title 13 Beavers. It may leave some youngsters disappointed to open the box and find just six wooden beavers inside. It seems the title relates to a legendary paradise which the 2-6 players are competing to join. The upshot is that this is a push-your-luck race game aimed at children but certainly playable as a family game.
The track on the board is what you might expect to find in a traditional roll & move game but there are no dice in 13 Beavers. Instead, this game uses a deck of 52 cards (four each numbered 1-13). On your turn, you guess whether the next card flipped will be higher or lower than the card displayed. Guess right and you move your beaver forward one space. You can keep going by making further guesses and when you decide to stop you move your beaver dam to your beaver's new location. However, as soon as you guess wrong your beaver moves back to its dam, so you'd end your turn having made no progress.
There are a few special spots, including a lava area where you're forced to keep going because you can't move your dam to it and a pool where you get to play a magnetic fishing mini game but you're mostly just making push-your-luck guesses. Brits of a certain age will recognise the higher/lower game as 'Play Your Cards Right' - a TV game show presented by Bruce Forsyth in the 1980s - and Americans may know it as the TV game show Card Sharks.
There's an educational element to 13 Beavers in that it encourages younger children to work out simple odds (with a 3 on top of the pile, you're five times as likely to draw a card that's higher than one that's lower). In our plays with children in the target age range for the game, we found much initial excitement and enthusiasm for the game but for some this waned after the first few rounds because they found the game repetitious, and that despite the tweaks offered by the lava, fishing mini-game and 'snakes & ladders'-style rapids et al.
13 Beavers is designed by Matt Edmondson and is available in the UK from Amazon, Waterstones and John Lewis.