Designed by: Reiner Knizia
There’s a surprise in store when you open the Botswana box – alongside a relatively normal deck of 30 cards you’ll find a big pile of hand-painted plastic animals – five varieties in all; not your usual-looking tabletop game.
The cards are numbered 0 to 5 in five suits; lions, zebras, hippos, elephants and leopards, and gameplay is extremely simple. On your turn, play an animal card in front of the relevant animal stock, and take an animal of your choice. Once all six cards of a single animal have been played, the round is over, and players score for all the animals they’ve taken. The catch is that each animal scores points equal to the last card played for that animal: anywhere from zero to five points. So if the last card played to the elephant row was a five, your elephants are all worth five points each. Of course, someone probably saw you amassing elephants, and dropped the zero on there just after you played the five, meaning all your elephants are worth a big fat nothing.
In essence Botswana is an incredibly simple stock market game, and could easily have been produced with coloured wooden cubes rather than painted plastic animals; but the production values give it a tactile quality and theme that will definitely appeal to children.
The gameplay doesn't feel too nasty - you're usually hurting your own point share when you take someone else's down.
Play whizzes around extremely quickly, even with five players.
Some simple arithmetic but nothing onerous. Keeping count of who has most points could slow things down, but the game is so light it's not really worth the effort. You might easily be the one to play the sixth card, ending the round, only to discover that your opponents had more points than you!
You'll usually play four rounds, which won't take more than half an hour total, and will even out some of the luck involved.
5-5
Players
6+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
A game of simple rules but tough decisions, both hallmarks of designer Reiner Knizia. I can't help feeling the plastic animals are attempting to make up for a slightly underwhelming experience for kids, though. Take them away and the game is actually rather brutal! However if you're ok with dashed hopes, the fact it is so simple and tactile do make it a game parents and young children can play together very easily.