Super Kawaii Pets

• Designer: William Cavaglieri
• Publisher: Arcane Wonders
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Super Kawaii Pets is a game of set collection based on the concept of rescuing various kinds of pets and making them happy.  From a common market, you pick sad animal cards and the resource cards they need: love, food, and medicines. Spending the resources turns them from sad to happy animals that are worth happiness points. You can then assign them to special locations that grant even more happiness points. When enough happy animals and locations have been assigned, the game ends and the player with the happiest shelter wins.

To set up the game, shuffle the three decks (Location cards, Help cards, and Animal cards, all sad side up).  A display is made of each deck, 3 cards in size.  For the Animal cards, place the top 2 cards of the deck, again Sad side up, on the table, and then the top card of the deck will serve as the third option.   Someone gets the First Player card.  

On a turn, the active player must first draw two cards, from the Animal and Help cards – taking one of the visible cards or the draw pile.  Then, the player may take the actions in whatever order they want and as often as they want: Play an Animal card from their hand, Flip an Animal card to its happy side, and obtain a Location card for a Happy animal.

When you play an Animal card, it goes Sad side up.  The top of the card shows the Help cards required to flip it over to the Happy side; the background color of the card also gives you a hint as to what Help cards it will want.  If you are able to play the appropriate Help cards from your hand, you can flip a card over to the happy side.  Many of the Animals will also cause a Draw effect – often specifying the type of card which must be added to the hand.  Happy Animals will score you victory points, seen in the bottom left corner.

The Location cards have a desired combination of happy animals in the upper right corner.  If you have the matching set in your area, you can assign them to the Location, taking the Location card from the supply and putting the assigned animals underneath it.  This Location will be worth Victory points at the end of the game – as shown in the bottom left corner.

The game continues until a player has 10 scoring cards (Happy Animals and Locations), and the game will then end as soon as the current round ends – so that all players have had the same number of turns.  Players now score positive points for each of their Happy Animals and Locations and take a one point penalty for each sad animal they have.  The player with the most points wins, ties broken in favor of the person with the least Sad penalty points.

My thoughts on the game

This filler card game always seems to end surprisingly early (at least for my expectations).  As a player only needs 10 scoring cards to end the game, and it is possible to gain two or three cards in a good turn – there are lots of surprise endings here.  Which is fine; the game is admittedly fairly light, and at 15 to 20 minutes, it never outstays its welcome.

Turns go by quick here – usually the biggest decision is a quick glance to your cards to see if you are able to chain some actions together based on your card play – that is, will you play cards that allow you to draw extra cards from the display?  As you are otherwise limited to only two cards drawn per turn, any extra cards help accelerate your pace towards scoring.  

I find that more help cards are always better as you have a good chance of having an animal randomly flipped up onto the display that match the cards you already have!  Extra animals aren’t bad early on, but you have to watch how many you take as the game winds on as any unfulfilled animals are worth negative points at the end of the game.

You are mostly in your own space here, though there can be a bit of a race aspect to the Locations – so it’s always a good idea to look around the table and see if anyone else is collecting the animal types that you are also working on.  Getting a Wild animal can be extremely useful in this regard due to the extra flexibility it gives you.

The art is… cute. Is it kawaii?  I guess it depends on how you define/translate it.  The sad sides of the animals are definitely not Kawaii. And well, some of them, like the happy Rabbit, umm, look like they’re on acid.  Also not what I would call kawaii.  But – the art is expressive and fun, and the icons on the cards are all easy to read and understand.

Super Kawaii Pets is a nicely done filler/intro level game that will do well with children and families.  The rules are easy to understand, but there is enough here to keep you interested for more than a single play.  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale, John P
• Not for me…