Go Wild with the Surprisingly Tense Family-Friendly Board Game Botswana

By Keith Law | October 1, 2025 | 11:30am

Photos courtesy of 25th Century Games

Tabletop Reviews board games

Go Wild with the Surprisingly Tense Family-Friendly Board Game Botswana

Botswana is the latest iteration of a Reiner Knizia game that dates back to 1992 and has been through many lives already, including one as an abstract game called Quandary published by Milton Bradley. This newest version distills the game to the basics and comes in a more appropriate box size for a quick, family-friendly game that has a clever bidding component.

As in most of Knizia’s games, the theme is very beside the point in Botswana, which just happens to use African animals as the tokens/images but has nothing else to do with the country. There are five animal types in the game, and five tokens of each, plus a deck of 30 cards showing each of the animals with cards numbered zero through five. At the start of each round, you deal nearly all of the cards evenly to all players, just leaving two or three in the box unless you have the maximum of five players.

On a turn, you play one card from your hand next to the matching animal token pile, and then select any token from any pile, not necessarily the one to which you played. At the end of a round of Botswana, you’ll receive points for each animal token you have equal to the last card played to that animal. There are no other rules for placement, so the value of an animal token can go from zero to five or five to zero in one turn, which can significantly swing the scoring for the round.

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When you play one of your hand cards, you place it at the end of the column of cards underneath that animal so previous cards are visible, allowing everyone to see what’s been played and thus what might still be out there. Once any animal has six cards beneath it, the round ends immediately and you move to scoring, so if an animal has five cards in its column, you know the round can end on any player’s turn from there. There’s a slight first-player advantage here, so the standard game involves one round per player, giving everyone a chance to go first.

Botswana board game review

There’s a surprising amount of tension in Botswana despite the simple rules. You’re betting on which animals are going to have the highest values at the end of a round, but you make those bets in an environment where the amount of information you have increases as the supply of animals to select decreases. When the round starts, the only information you have is what’s in your hand, so while you can take any animal you want, you’re kind of just guessing. You can also try to steer that animal’s value upward, but your ability to do so is limited by what’s in your hand and what other players might be planning.

The African theme first appeared in a 2010 release; it’s also been published as Quandary, Loco!, Wildlife Safari, and Flinke Pinke, the last of which apparently is German for Little Pinkie. That all points to how abstract the game itself is, a common trait for Reiner Knizia designs—my favorite Knizia game, Samurai, is getting a new theme and title as Hanami through a printing that’s on Kickstarter right now. This version, from 25th Century, has new and significantly better art from Weberson Santiago (who did the distinctive art for Sail and Dracula vs. Van Helsing). I’d rather see this game under another name, since it has nothing to do with Botswana on any level, but that’s a quibble.

I’ve played this with both three and four and it benefits from having a couple of cards removed from the deck to increase the uncertainty around when the round is going to end. With five, you deal all cards, so you lose some of that tension around the round ending, and players will end up with fewer tokens per round, but the main mechanics should work fine. I can’t imagine playing this at two, though.

Botswana is an easy teach and games take up to 35 to 40 minutes. Even with brand-new players, though, I found the rounds sped up as we went along, so with experienced players the game time could probably come in well under 30. I’ve also only played with adults, but there’s nothing here a smart 8-year-old couldn’t handle. Well, except finding out that their elephants went from five points to zilch.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.