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Sitting Down With The Team Behind Scavengers (And Kavango!)
When Kavango first arrived on my table, it became one of those games that reminded me why I love this hobby. I described it at the time as “a glorious, interlinked, cascading, connected puzzle that will fill your heart with every play”, and clearly I was not alone in falling for what designers Matt and Zara had created. Since then, Kavango has travelled far beyond that first crowdfunding campaign, selling around the world in five languages, picking up major awards and even helping fund conservation work across southern Africa.
So when I heard their next game was on the way, I was immediately interested. Scavengers stays within the Kavango world but heads in a very different direction, swapping the sprawling nature-reserve puzzle for a fast, highly interactive card game about vultures and other scavengers competing around a carcass in the Kalahari. Played across dusk, midnight and dawn, it is built around bluffing, bidding and trying to outmanoeuvre everyone else at the table, with action cards and even the threat of a lion ready to upset the pecking order.
What makes Scavengers particularly interesting to me is that the story behind the game feels every bit as deliberate as the design itself. The idea came after Matt and Zara visited conservation partner Vulpro in South Africa and learned more about the vital role vultures play in preventing the spread of disease, alongside the considerable image problem these extraordinary animals still face. Before getting the finished game to the table, I spoke with them about where Scavengers came from, how Kavango changed their lives, why sustainability remains central to everything they make, and what comes next.
Wow, Kavango has been just such a huge success. So many copies have been sold. Great reviews. And now a distribution deal with a major European manufacturer. You must be buzzing! Did you ever think your debut game would achieve such success?
Thanks so much, Jim! You’ve been such a huge support since the start. We still remember when we read your review of Kavango and it really made us feel so happy to know that we’d connected with people in the way we were aiming for. We still remember it by heart: “It’s a glorious, interlinked, cascading, connected puzzle that will fill your heart with every play.” The thing that resonated most was “will fill your heart with every play”. That’s exactly what we wanted it to do. We wanted it to inspire joy and awe towards the natural world and help people feel connected to the amazing wildernesses in southern Africa.
Your review was the first inkling we had that we’d managed to do that for some people and it meant so much. We couldn’t really have dreamt that Kavango would have the reach that it has. It’s now sold in five languages across the world, has won the Origins and Green Game Guide Award for Sustainable Product Design 2026 and we get the most wonderful messages from people all the time who love the game and who have these amazing personal stories of connection to nature and wildlife. We’ve also been able to financially support conservation charities that are doing vital work to protect nature and biodiversity in southern Africa with the profits from Kavango - this is incredibly important to us and we’re so honoured that we can contribute.
It’s quite something to know that a game we have created from our minds and lived experience has resonated with so many people. It’s been the most fulfilling couple of years and gives us a lot of hope for the future of the natural world. It is clear to us every day, from the messages we get from people all over the world, that there is a huge global community that cares deeply about nature.
We feel very lucky to be building this Kavango community where the focus is on joy, fun and connection with friends and family through a shared love of the natural world. So often the climate and nature crises are framed in such negative terms and there is only so much despair that we can sustain. We are proud to be contributing to joy and a positive hopeful message about nature in our own particular way. That is the ultimate success for us.
I could not agree more. Often in life, people respond to things either with a push or pull. And I feel with sustainability and environmental issues, we need to see the hope and work we can do to repair what we broke. Not the despair of how badly we broke it in the first place. That often can make people feel hopeless, when there is so much hope. Back to the game, what do you attribute all this success to, what do you think made Kavango so special?
Truly I think it is an excellent game, with a satisfying story arc and beautiful art. I think that is why it has continued to grow beyond the Kickstarter. But most people hadn’t played it when they supported our first Kickstarter. Over 3,000 people across the world backed us to bring our dream to life. How do we account for that success?
I think that it’s ultimately a testimony to the amazing global board gaming community and their love and passion for the hobby. I think that reviewers and players saw two people who were trying to fulfil their dream and wanted to support us. We came to our first Kickstarter completely new. We had no board game industry insight, had no networks in the industry, we had never done crowdfunding, marketing, graphic design or art professionally before.
Looking back it is quite amazing and we owe it all to the board gaming community and to people like you, Jim, for seeing what we were trying to do and believing in us and ultimately putting their hard earned cash behind supporting us.
I think a lot of us in the community saw a great game made by great people with a great cause behind it. You deserve it all. Since then, what have you been up to?
We did our second Kickstarter campaign in 2025 for the Lodges Expansion, Let’s Go Kavango and some new animal booster packs to add 21 new animals to your nature reserve. This has been really well received - including by you, thank you again! - and we’re really excited for people to start playing with the Lodges Expansion and relish the new puzzle it adds to the game.
We’ve introduced 21 new animals through Captivating Cats, Brilliant Birds and our Animal Booster Pack and we’re really glad that we’ve got some of these animals into the game. Again this is a personal story for us. We made Captivating Cats in honour of our cat Precious Ramotswe who died in early 2025. We adopted her in Botswana and she was the third member of our team throughout the whole Kavango journey. She was a great cat and we wanted to immortalise her in shiny form. We love the idea that she is being played into Nature Reserves by people across the world.
We’re also very proud of Let’s Go Kavango, which is a streamlined travel version of Kavango. It has all the strategy and all the animals but in a small box. As you know, the environment and sustainability is the no.1 priority for us with our games and that’s where the idea for Let’s Go Kavango game comes from. We wanted to update the decks of cards for our original Kickstarter backers because we had made some changes to the cards in a later edition and we wanted our original backers to have the best version of the game. However, we didn’t want people to throw out their cards and recycling services can vary based on where you live. So, we positioned this problem through the lens of the circular economy and decided that the best option was for people to be able to reuse their original cards.
It tied in perfectly with other feedback that we’d been having that people wanted to take Kavango on holiday with them but the game was too big and heavy. And we also wanted to design a version of the game that we could sell more easily in southern Africa with a lower price-point and lower barrier to shipping. So this idea of making a travel edition of Kavango, which people could create themselves with their old deck of cards, was how Let’s Go Kavango was born and we included it as a free add-on for all of our returning fans in our Lodges Expansion Kickstarter campaign.
Building on from Kavango, we are more committed than ever to our mission of inspiring people to protect our world’s biodiversity through the power of games. We’ve got a pipeline of games and so many ideas. We’ll talk more about Scavengers later but that is our next game which is a fun card bidding game that’s perfect for group game night.
We’re working alongside this on our next big game offering, Beaver: Born to Rewild. We live in the Scottish Highlands now and Zara is working on Beaver reintroductions after 400 years of absence for our landscape. It’s been amazing to see how much positive impact the beavers have had on the landscape by recreating wetlands and supporting entire ecosystems returning to these landscapes. We became inspired to make a game about these incredible ecosystem engineers and tell this beautiful story of rewilding. In the game you will play as a family of beavers reintroduced to the Scottish Highlands and you’ll build your dam to create a mosaic of wetland habitats and reintroduce an array of native wildlife.
Sounds great! I am excited to try it. But for now, tell me about your next game, Scavengers?
We came up with the idea for Scavengers when we were visiting one of our charity partners, Vulpro, in South Africa in January 2026. We heard from them the importance of vultures to African ecosystems as a vital clean-up crew to stop the spread of disease. But they are difficult to conserve and protect because they have a PR issue. So we decided to make a game about vultures and other scavengers to showcase the beauty, power and importance of these animals.
Scavengers is a new addition to the Kavango world. Over one dramatic night - split into 3 rounds: dusk, midnight and dawn - you'll play as scavengers in the Kalahari competing for food at the carcass. Bluff, bid and outmanoeuvre your opponents to win the most food for your scavengers. You’ll be dealt a hand of cards at the start of each phase of the night (dusk, midnight and dawn). Each round consists of five feeds, where you can bid to win food. The value of the feeds increases as the night progresses. Action cards can invert the power of your scavengers so even the underdog can win and beware the power of the lion who will scare away your scavengers and steal food from the carcass!
It’s designed for 2-5 players, ages 8+, with a playtime of around 20-30 minutes. It’s an easy-to-learn, small-box, quick-playing card game in the same genre as games like Scout, Skull King, Flip 7 and Perudo, but with the bonus of some beautiful animals! It is a lot of fun and has high player interaction, making it perfect for group game night or family holidays!
Well, I have been loving it myself, my full review is below. And I understand you are making this game in Europe to reduce transport emissions. How easy was that to change budget and logistics-wise?
Sustainability is our no.1 priority and we are always looking for ways to improve. Scavengers is plastic free, made from 80% recycled materials (the rest is FSC sourced) and was manufactured in a factory that is powered by the Spanish sun!
There’s no way of getting around the fact that transport is one of the major sources of emissions from our products. We wanted to try manufacturing in Europe to reduce these emissions by manufacturing closer to our European and British customers. It is more expensive but it also has a shorter lead-time so there is benefit in being able to get the product to customers more quickly.
We’re working with AGR who are based in Spain and have a solar powered factory. They’ve been great so far and we are really excited that they’ve been able to make Scavengers in time for a release at Essen Spiel 2026. We’ll be selling the first copies at the convention and then will do a wider release in the weeks after Essen.
I love this. Good on you for leading the way - again! Do you think others in the gaming sector can do more in this area?
Others in every sector can and should do more in this area. We think a lot about a quote from the naturalist Dr. Jane Goodall: “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
We are very honoured to be able to make products that people want to buy and we take that responsibility with the utmost seriousness to produce products that touch the world as lightly as possible. A lot of people are doing this in the board gaming world and we’ve taken inspiration from other games. We’ve definitely seen increasingly more games embrace sustainable materials and manufacturing approaches. We’re trying to show that it is possible and help people reimagine what a good, high quality, sustainably designed game can look like. We want our games to be as sustainable as possible with no increased cost to our customers. It is possible. We are doing it - and we hope others will follow suit.
Here here! So, what are your plans for the next few months?
We are launching Scavengers at Essen Spiel in October 2026 which is very exciting. And we’re also extremely excited to see Kavango being played as one of the tournament games in Europe Masters at Essen Spiel! So those are two major milestones and moments for us. Once we’ve launched Scavengers we will go full on into the final development and art for Beaver: Born to Rewild. We are doing playtesting events at the York Environment Festival in October and plan to do a Beaver Tour of Britain in the new year where we take the prototypes to play with people and then visit beaver wetlands. More to come on that soon.
What a delight to speak with you! (Let's hope our review of Scavengers is good, that could be very awkward!) You can check that out here.
