Creating Kavango - a journey of hope
Hi everyone,
It's Zara here! One of the designers of Kavango.
Kavango began in 2020 in the turbulence of covid lockdowns. Three months of lockdown and regular forest walks planted the seed in our minds for a game about rewilding and this grew and expanded when we moved to Botswana.
As this is our first blog, I wanted to start at the beginning. A lot of you ask us where the idea for Kavango came from and why we chose to tell this story through a board game. This blog will answer all of that with reflections on the deeper motivation behind what we do.
How Covid Changed our Plans
Matt and I got married at the end of 2019 and we were preparing to move out to Botswana where I'd secured a job working on combatting the illegal wildlife trade. We were all ready to go when covid hit and before we could relocate, Botswana closed its borders.
The Idea Takes Root
It was in the next 3 months that the first seeds of Kavango were planted. I was already thinking a lot about my job and planning for the years ahead in Botswana. One of the major conservation projects I'd be working on was called the Biodiverse Landscapes Fund - a fund supporting transboundary landscapes across five biodiverse global regions. One of them was the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area - sound familiar?! You got it! It's where our game gets its name.
During this time we played lots of board games, got lots of Yahtzees (evidence below) and went for long walks in the forest every day; that's when we started mapping out a board game about rewilding and restoring degraded landscapes.
A very different initial concept
Our original game was called 'Life on Earth' and had a global focus. Players were rewilding in four global regions: the Himalayas, the Congo Basin, the Kalahari and the Arctic Tundra. Matt drew some beautiful animals from these regions and sadly we had to drop animals like the gorilla and polar game from the game! We still have those cards in our memory box (see below!). In this version of the game, there were 'event' cards too and bad things could happen that would reduce protections levels for players and potentially remove species from their ecosystems - we removed this pretty quickly after a couple of games where we lost our Polar Bears! Way too sad.
Making Kavango Real
When we moved to Botswana we knew almost instantly that this needed to be the sole geographic focus of our game. We were out in nature all the time and meeting people who had devoted their lives to restoring nature. What was amazing was that these efforts were working. Here was a story of optimism and hope that we felt the climate and nature world so badly needed. There is only so much despair that our spirits can sustain and we were desperate to hold onto hope and joy.
Although we were both working on climate and nature - I was working on combatting the illegal wildlife trade and Matt was working on sustainable civil and structural engineering - we were finding it hard to have the impact we wanted. Sometimes it felt like our focus was always on stopping bad things rather than promoting good things and we couldn't shake the feeling that there needed to be more balance in the way people engaged with and talked about climate and nature.
So over the next three years, Kavango developed and became increasingly honed on our lived experience and love for the region. Matt's hand drawn board-game art of the animals is largely based on our sightings of them in the wild. We met real-life conservation heroes and reflected them in our conservation experts. Our landscape boards are based on real places in Botswana which we visited regularly and which had their own distinctive characteristics.
The journey of making Kavango gave us so much joy and helped us focus our attention on everything good and great and beautiful in the vibrant world all around us.
Reflections
It's quite hard to write this blog from where we are here, today. We live in Scotland now and the mountains around our home have been burning for the past 14 days in the worst wildfire they've ever endured. It is horrifying and heartbreaking to see the impacts of climate breakdown play out in real-time in front of our eyes.
We know we're not alone and that extreme weather events and wildfires are causing an unbearable about of pain and suffering for people across the world. It's been a difficult couple of weeks and a test of our hope and resilience.
But it's been good to reflect on our journey with Kavango. It's helped us remember that nature gave us strength before and will again - and reminded us of the power of focusing on what we have rather than what we've lost.
So, we've been visiting our local beaver wetlands in our evenings and finding solace in the changes that they're already making to our landscape. Beavers haven't lived wild in the UK for over 400 years and I'm a trustee of a charity called The Beaver Trust that is reintroducing them across the UK. Where we live now is a pioneering site for beaver reintroduction and these little ecosystem engineers are working wonders. Their continued presence will help with wildfire prevention in the long-term as well.
It's been powerful to be reminded again that nature gives us hope and solace. Just like Kavango helped pull us through the shaking and upending of life that came from the covid-19 pandemic, our new project Beaver: Born to Rewild is doing the same to help us move through these wildfires with resilience and a determined hope for the future.
In Beaver: Born to Rewild, you will play as a family of beavers reintroduced into the Scottish Highlands. You'll forage for resources, build your dam and develop a new wetland ecosystem that will host an array of native species. With this game we are once again centring our focus on what we have and the wonderful nature that is all around us.
Our mission is clearer now than ever. We still strongly believe that telling positive stories about nature through games is a powerful tool to build empathy, joy and community and ultimately inspire people to get involved to protect nature and biodiversity wherever they are. This is what you will always get when you buy one of our games - a board game designed by conservationists for people who love nature.
"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." - Václav Havel
Photo of Zara releasing a Beaver to the landscape after 400 years of absence.
If you want to know more about what we're building and why, you can read more about our mission here and learn about Kavango here.
Thanks for reading,
Zara
Zara is a conservation expert and co-founder of Mazaza Games. She has worked across southern Africa and globally on wildlife and ocean protection.