Botswana: Lions and Hippos and Elephants, Oh My!

You are a photographer in Africa! Can you snap pictures of the most photogenic animals? But watch out, as their value is constantly changing.

Botswana, a classic Reiner Knizia game, has been revamped and refreshed by 25th Century Games. It’s for 2-5 players and has a play time of 20-30 minutes.

Gameplay

The deck is shuffled and dealt out to each player. Cards show one of five animals, and a value of 0-5. Each animal type has five meeples in the center of the table. On a player’s turn, he plays one of his cards, placing it on top of any other cards already played of that animal type, but ensuring that the previous values can still be seen. He then takes one animal meeple of any type – it does not have to match the card he just played. It is now the next player’s turn.

After the sixth card of one species has been played, the round ends. Players count how many meeples they collected of each animal type. The last card played of each animal determines how many points each meeple of that animal is worth for the round.

Meeples are then returned to the center of the table, and cards are reshuffled and dealt out again. After completing one round per player, the game ends. The player with the highest score wins the game.

Review

Botswana is, mechanically, nice and simple. You play a card; you collect an animal. You know the cards in your hand, so you can try to maneuver one animal into being worth more than another. Players can also try to bluff, playing lower-level number cards for an animal, knowing they have a five or four they can play later. It’s possible a round will end before you have a chance to play all the cards you want, though, so you have to be careful.

This is a game that’s all about the player interactions, seeing where other people are playing, trying to guess which cards they’re building up to putting down, hedging your bets across multiple animals, or going all in on one if you think you can push up its value and keep it high.

This new edition is also gorgeous, with a unique art style and enjoyable animal meeples. The game does justice aesthetically to its theme of these beautiful animals, and the components are also solidly made and enjoyable to play with.

We found games were usually close, although one bad turn can set you significantly back. Downtime wasn’t an issue even at the higher player counts, as turns are fast, and players are also trying to figure out the order they should play their own cards based off what other players choose to do. This is an excellent card game. Recommended!

Pros: Flow of the game, player interaction, components and artwork

Cons: It is possible to have a really bad round that’s hard to recover from

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.