Botswana

Botswana was a birthday gift -- it seems like everyone in Anne's family figured out that we enjoy animal-based games.  This one is a card game, and it's colorful and simple, but catchy.

I can only talk about the two-player game, since we hardly ever get out to game with other people.  The setup is simple: put the five batches of five animals on the table, set aside two cards, shuffle the rest and deal out all the cards.  There's a scoring board with numbers running from 1 to 50, and each player gets a blank score token and another token with 50 on one side and 100 on the other side.

The turns are simple: each player plays a card and takes an animal.  The cards are numbered from 0 to 5 and are played vertically below the animal stacks.  You can take any animal; it doesn't matter which card was played.  When the sixth card is played for any animal, the round is over.  Then, the top card (last card played) for each animal gives the point value of that animal for that round.  Tally up the scores one animal at a time, and setup the next round.

It seemed fairly trivial at first, but there is some gameplay to keep in mind.  Since each set of animal cards runs from 0 to 5, you will have an idea for which cards your opponent has.  If it wasn't for those two cards set aside at the start of the round, in the two-player game, you would know EXACTLY which cards your opponent has.  Suppose you have the 0,3,4 of the giraffe cards.  The other player probably has the 1,2 and 5.  

The strategy should be obvious, but there are two perfectly competing objectives: maximize your score and undermine the opponent's score.  If you have the 5 of a suit, you could grab those animals throughout the round and slap down that 5 as the final play, but the other player might play a 6th card on another stack before you can complete that plan.  Suppose you play the 5 giraffe early: the other player might see your 4 giraffe tokens (20 points) and slap the 0 giraffe on that pile later, killing most of your score.  You might be able to recover some of those point with a 3 giraffe card, but there are only so many plays per hand.  After a few hands we found ourselves spending more time blocking each other than caring about our own points.

It's interesting enough.  Halfway through the second round, we noticed that the animal art was different on every card.  That's when we both started sorting the cards and took it a bit more seriously, and the art didn't line up at the edges.  I was flipping through my meerkat cards and saw that one card with the meerkat looking right at me.  Huh?  We see so many games where there are just cards with numbers in the corners, we didn't expect this extra effort put into the art.

This one is a keeper.