Kavango Board Game Review – A Must Play!

Written by Dan York

How to play Kavango

The game takes place over a svelte three rounds, each of which sees players pick-and-pass drafting a hand of cards to build and complement their nature reserve. Cards come in three types: actions, animals, and food stocks. Action cards give you an immediate effect such as gaining money or taking a card out of the discard pile to retrieve an animal you sadly had to discard in a prior round. Food stock cards represent the base-level of the food chain needed to establish a healthy habitat, including grasses, trees, insects and fish and are tucked under your player board, contributing the symbols needed to play animal cards. Finally animal cards, the bread and butter of Kavango which can only be played if you have the right food for them (which for predators can sometimes be other types of animals) already and sit in your reserve, ready to score victory points. 

After playing a card each turn, players then have the opportunity to score points and money and invest that money into improving their reserve. In each round, there will be four “research cards”, or minor objectives (such as having a number of a certain type of animal, or animals with a given size or weight etc) which can be claimed by each player. Typically, these will have multiple options for scoring thresholds and it’s up to you if you want to wait for a bigger payout or cash in your current progress for a small upfront burst of income. Money is important because it must be invested in Habitat, Smuggling and Climate protection, the latter of which being a global track that all players work on together. Many animal cards in Kavango not only need specific food availability but can only be brought into your reserve if you have sufficiently developed one or more of these fields. This creates a delicate balance between waiting to score more points later and investing early enough that you can claim the cards you need. 

Players each have a unique role card, giving them access to a minor, but steering, power that only they can use as they take on the responsibilities of, say a conversationist or lawmaker, each of which having a role to play in the development of a thriving nature reserve.

Is Kavango a good board game?

Kavango comes in a fairly large, heavy box with a lot of components and cards. Despite this, it’s actually incredibly easy to pick up and play. I was sceptical at the recommended game length on the box, but it is a much faster game than one might think. Having said that, there is plenty of strategy and decision-making in Kavango to make it highly appealing for gamers of all interests. 

It’s hard to get away from the fact that a lot of Kavango feels like playing a game of 7 Wonders, the need to balance scoring cards with “resource” cards that passively allow you to take bigger and better options is a major point of overlap, but I feel that the drafting in Kavango is much more interesting as a prospect. Every round there is a real tension between when to pick food cards and when to stake a claim to a high-scoring animal, not least because there are no food cards available in round three at all, essentially locking your engine-building decisions in for the final act. It’s easy enough to glance around the table and make an assessment about whether the elephant card you really want is likely to come back around to you or not, or whether you should stop the player to your left getting this high-scoring honey badger right now. With that said, it never feels overly pressing. While there’s a lot of reward for choosing the right cards at the right time, there’s flexibility baked into the rules to prevent too many dead-end scenarios for players who don’t or can’t get what they need. Short a grass symbol? Just buy a rewilding card. Need this animal for an objective but can’t place it yet? Put it into your sanctuary for later. It’s likely not optimal, but it means that things are rarely game-endingly punishing.

I’ve enjoyed Kavango at many player counts, the experience is broadly agnostic to the number of people playing. It takes about the same amount of time, and the decisions, while different with more or fewer players, remain interesting from the first to the last pick in each round. For such a gentle game, I must caution about table-space. This is a big one, personal player boards, hosting animals, take up a lot of room, and with the score track and objective cards, it’s not the sort of game that supports the smaller table.

The soul of drafting games, where the goal is to keep an eye on many things at once, is clarity. Kavango passes with only one note. The player aids are great at preventing you from over-investing in the wrong resources and card cost and requirements are easy to parse. Some of the personal objective cards are a little opaque, being asked to collect “crepuscular” animals with only the information that they are “depicted at twilight” isn’t fully clear when some of the artwork shows animals at many times during the day. There is a well laid out appendix to resolve some of these issues, but it’s a shame to have to consult a second rulebook to check something that honestly isn’t worth that many points.

Despite this, I love the presentation of this game, the pastel shades on the player pieces and the sandy textures of the boards make it bright and appealing. Animals are depicted as realistic drawings, rather than simplified or cartooned, this adds to the authenticity of the project while injecting it with an uncanny charm. The production is great, it’s a lot of small quality-of-life things that tie it together. Between the card holders which tell you how many of each type go in each round, the recessed protection boards and the double-sided player boards so you can choose if you’d prefer to lay your cards on top, or slot them into something to protect from errant drafts. It feels like a product made with love.

My play groups and I love to draft, and we have loved every game of Kavango we’ve played. From the art to the rules, there’s an uncurrent of authenticity and passion all over this production and that manifests as a true gem of a game. If you like the gameplay of 7 Wonders, the thematic aspects of Ark Nova and the wholesomeness of Wingspan then I can’t recommend Kavango enough. It stands on the shoulders of many giants and it strikes the right balance of being engaging and interesting without dragging on for more than an hour, at most. If you’ve only got space for one animal-themed card game in your life, Kavango could easily fill that need. 

Kavango Review

Kavango is a must-play board game. Just the right length, just the right level of complexity, a real Goldilocks of a game.

You should try this if you liked 7 Wonders – The tension of choosing whether to draft points or resources from 7 Wonders is baked deep into Kavango but with a stronger focus on tactical point-scoring and wildlife conservation

About Kavango

Designer: Matt Brown, Zara Reid

Publisher: Mazaza Games

Time: 40-60

Players: 1-5

Ages: 10+

Price: £60

What's in the box?

• 5 Landscape Boards
• 5 Protection Boards
• Central Board
• 10 Animeeples
• 30 Wooden Tokens
• 210 Cards
• 24 Rewilding Cards
• 60 Objective Cards
• 3 Organisation Trays