Kavango Second Opinion

I must preface this review before I start. This is a Second Opinion piece, and the original review here on Zatu is overwhelmingly positive, which means this review is going to heavily focus on issues I personally have with Kavango. It’s important to note, I really enjoy this game (I just named it my Game of the Month for October 2024) and would still recommend you play it, so despite all the negative aspects I’m about to spotlight in this review, this game is overall super fun and I’d recommend reading the other review too.

WHAT IS KAVANGO?

In case this is the first review of Kavango you’re reading, here’s the low down. Kavango, published by Mazaza Games and developed by the wonderful Matt Brown and Zara Reid, is a card drafting game where you act as a conservation expert, building a thriving nature reserve and paying money into different types of protections to aid in your conservation goals. I like to call it Sushi Go meets Wyrmspan/Wingspan.

With wildlife protection at its core, Kavango stands strong. There’s a list provided of all the ways they’ve been eco-friendly in the game’s production, and where the money on the game is going. Matt and Zara are conservation experts themselves, and their heart is beating strong throughout this game.

GNAT-PICKS..NITPICKS...YOU GET IT

Let us start with the small issues with the game and ramp up, shall we? Here are some issues that don’t necessarily impact the gameplay, but bother me...

1) The Box Sleeve

I have the Kickstarter edition of the game and can’t speak on the other released versions. This game box is chonky (more on that later) and comes with a sleeve that goes around it. Not only do I not see the purpose for this sleeve, but there’s no special design or anything exciting about it. It’s the same on the sleeve as it is on the box. Why? Is that not a waste of resources? Is that not anti-message? Again, it doesn’t impact the game, but it is now an extra, unnecessary step to getting into the game.

2) The small card tray design

On the small card tray you have numbers printed. These areas are reserved for the cards that have the same numbers printed on the backs of them. My issue is, for some reason, the orientations on the card backs don’t match the orientation on the tray. That just bugged me. They should match.

3) Cube tray is shallow

You have cute little cubes that represent money that go into a cube tray. The cube tray is great for one layer, but it’s just slightly too shallow for the second. If you knock it, the cubes are going everywhere. I’m unsure as to why they didn’t make it high enough, or if the deluxe version fixes this, but this version is around £60. I shouldn’t have to pay more for a component to do its job.

Plus, every player’s supply is connected to one cube tray, so packing away after is messier than it needs to be. Bowls would have been nice, or separate trays. Then you can keep your money near you and/or pour directly from the tray into the bag at the end.

4) Board Section Names

This one is smaller than a nitpick and just a silly brain moment, but although thematically it makes sense to call the main section of the board “The Reserve” as you’re placing animals into your nature reserve, it is weird that you have to place animals in your “Sanctuary” in order to “reserve” them for play. I’m a few games in now but my brain still isn’t used to that yet.

5) Player Count

Can you play it with 5? Yeah, but you shouldn’t. It just isn’t as good, and it removes a significant amount of the drafting strategy as you only see each hand twice. By the time it loops back, you can’t remember what was in it anyway.

Bigger Fish

Let’s now discuss some bigger problems which effect the game.

1) Turn Tracker

Kavango is played over 3 ROUNDS, each consisting of 10 TURNS played simultaneously (I’ve capitalised to make the distinction between these terms clearer). The ROUNDS were easy to track as they have a corresponding deck, however we kept losing track of what TURN we were on because there isn’t any way to track it. Your hands are numbered as they go round, so you can count how many times you’ve had that specific hand, or you can count how many cards are left in your current hand to see how many turns you’ve gone through, but it adds an extra complication which removes you from the momentum of the game for a moment. We’ve resorted to using a 10-sided die, but for this much money, I shouldn’t have to bring in outside components to make the game more streamlined. This should have been raised in prototyping.

2) Components

The main progress board and one of the card trays already has some of the outside decal peeling off, and we’re having to be very careful not to ruin it. The card trays were flimsy to put together to begin with, but a peeling print is unacceptable and disappointing. The game boasts “Long Lasting Design” in its rulebook, which environmentally is true, but it doesn’t guarantee I’ll have a playable game in 5 years.

Also, as much as I love the animeeples, I think it’s a bummer to only be able to use one animeeple of your colour at a time. I also imagine they’re not cheap to uniquely cut and design, so I believe that that money could have been invested elsewhere. I would have settled for a simpler token, or half of them.

3) Player Boards

As mentioned earlier, Kavango is a chonky boy, especially for a game that is fairly simple (I have a lot to say on this later). The problem is. It really doesn’t need to be so heavy. The heaviest part of this box is the player boards, for which everyone has their own unique one. These boards (and the cards that decorate them) do not need to be as big as they are. I like to take Wyrmspan, for example, as it has similar boards. The Wyrmspan board is smaller. Are you placing more cards in Kavango than Wyrmspan? Sure, but Wyrmspan also has spare space that they generously use as rule reminders, and their cards are smaller. This game takes up so much unnecessary space, and has to be folded at 2 points (instead of Wyrmspan’s 1) to fit into the box. Speaking of -

4) The Box

This is the first game, ever, where I have had to remove the provided insert because I couldn’t figure out how to put the game away. When it comes to inserts, Heat, another huge game, is the best I’ve ever seen. They lead by example, having perfectly allocated space for everything, including expansions. Kavango didn’t even give me enough plastic bags.

The main issue was the built card trays. They wouldn’t fit in the insert. I had to remove it to place the tray in. Now keep in mind, I could be a complete idiot, but the only solution I saw was to take the trays apart which I didn’t want to do because one was already peeling. Outside of this problem, another matter is that the cards don’t stay in the trays when in the box. If I lay it flat it’s fine, but I stack my games sideways, and the box is so big that I don’t have a board game bag that can hold it flat for when I take it to other places. They haven’t provided a cut-out in the insert or a sealable bag to place my cards in to stop them flying everywhere in the box, so it’s a mess when I come back to it. In the deluxe version, they close off the ends of the card trays to store better and leave less off a mess. Whether they fit in the insert or not, I don’t know. I find it stupid. Bad inserts are a common problem for board games, but it’s 2024 and time to step up. This game is £60. I shouldn’t have to pay £30 more for a neater box.

5) Imbalanced Character Powers

Experts are our character cards in this game, and they each have a unique ability and a complexity rating. The higher the complexity, the harder it is to use their ability. I think it should be called the power rating. Some cards are really powerful and some aren’t, which makes the game really imbalanced. You can’t all have a low complexity character, there aren’t enough in the game. If someone has a low complexity character, they are going to have an easier time doing what they need to do. Let’s take the Investor and the Researcher:

INVESTOR: Double the money every time you play a “fund” action card. Also, Gain $2m for discarding (instead of 1)

RESEARCHER: At the start of the round, take an extra research card for that round. (In the rulebook it states - “The strength of this expert can vary depending on luck of the draw with your research tasks”).

So, the Investor gets a boatload of money, a resource that I find incredibly hard to come by if you can’t land those research tasks in the center...but the Researcher MIGHT make money and points if the extra card they draw happens to play into the nature reserve they’re already building OR is accessible to do with the hands available this round.

This isn’t a complexity issue. The Investor has more strategic advantage than the Researcher. It’s not asymmetrical, it’s unbalanced. I shouldn’t be forced to play a harder game because I’ve been left powerless as I can’t seem to draw a research card that I need.

Also, the cards themselves don’t have the complexity rating printed on them, so if you’re wanting to play without certain characters, you need to get the rulebook out to find out the rating for each expert. Another pointless step that could be fixed with better design.

THE KING OF THIS JUNGLE

The worst part of Kavango is the rulebook. This is hands down the worst rulebook I have had to follow in a while, possibly ever. It’s riddled with spelling errors, formatting errors, awkward directions etc. Let’s look into these...

1) Spelling/Formatting Errors

The spelling errors are few and far between to be honest, but an example of one is “tun” instead of “turn”.

The formatting and readability problems were more glaring. There were double spaces between words which made sentences look funny, and when they were describing turn order they have formatted it as:

1. Rule 1 3. Rule 3

2. Rule 2 4. Rule 4

This is not how people read information and I don’t know why it was written as such.

2) Turn to Page: “Bad Layout”

Speaking of readability, this book is messy. It’s so messy that they thought the best way to fix this is to add another book, the Appendix, filled with clarifications. Spoiler: it doesn’t help much.

There are a myriad of places that tell you to go to a different part of the book, but at points where you still don’t know certain things. The big one for me is goal cards. There is no reference as to whether you should, on first playthrough, use goal cards in your game. It just kept saying “if you’re using goal cards, [do this]” ... Am I using goal cards? I don’t know how to play your game yet, that’s why I’m here!

(Goal cards are on page 8 by the way and labelled “Expert Rules”, so maybe don’t use them on your first playthrough.)

On one page it tells you to see another page for information at least 5 times (this is page 4 by the way, if you need the proof), and the page before, it tells you 4 times. Even the setup page tells you to see another page for more information... I am on page 2, I shouldn’t need to see page 9 right now!!

3) Clarity

A weird part of this book is the order of how it tells you to do things in the ”Simultaneous Turns” section. Firstly, it tells you to choose a card. Which card? Don’t know. It just says to play in front of you and then reveal it at the same time. The second step is to Play a Card. The card you’ve chosen will now get played at the same time as everyone else. Ah, now it says what the cards are...

Do you see my problem? Why have they explained the different card types in the step after I’ve chosen a card. Surely, knowing what a card does, and whether I can play a card is pertinent to choosing a card. I know, I know... in the grand scheme of the game, you’ll know the cards and it’s not that deep. However, if you’re trying to learn how to play a game and trying to logically follow along, you’d prefer the order of things to be clear.

Also, under “Clarity” we should discuss headings. Kavango has one of those rulebooks where if you are confused on a rule, good luck finding the answer in the rulebook because it’s going to be a nightmare to find. We struggled with a rule about the Sanctuary. We ran into a situation where a player’s Sanctuary was full (not hard to do as you start the game with 2/3 spaces filled), but they wanted to place another animal in the Sanctuary later. Can they discard an animal in the Sanctuary? Have they deadlocked themselves? That information could be somewhere but I don’t know where to find it, and it’s definitely not under the “Sanctuary” heading.

CONCLUSION

Listen, I don’t want to hear from people who played this at an expo that they found the rulebook easy to follow. Reading back over a rulebook after you’ve played a game (especially one that has been demoed to you) is completely different from approaching a game you know barely anything about for the first time. I look at the rules now and see it as straight-forward, but I also left myself a voice recording telling myself to “not forget how frustrating learning this game was”. I have to cut past-me some slack. For a simple game, and it is very very simple, the rulebook makes it look meatier than it is.

Kavango is good. Luckily, the worst aspect of this game is something you rarely have to deal with after you know how it plays. The issues, despite me clearly having many, don’t outweigh how fun this game is, and I’ve played it multiple times since.

Edit: Before sending this off to Zatu, I’ve watched the Dice Tower peeps talk about it, and Zee Garcia pretty much summed up my stance – it's “feeling... advanced prototype-y...oh, you’ve published it already?”. It’s good, but mechanics and design flaws needed ironing out before charging people £60-£90 for it. I honestly don’t feel like Kavango is a £60 game. I can’t when components are ripping and the stuff barely fits in the box. BUT...it is a great game, so it’s up to you, dear reader, if it seems worth the hassle. Who knows, you may have a better experience.