My wife always wanted a dog and, while we lived in a small condo, I had joked with her that I was expecting to come home from work one day and find a dog sitting on our couch. Fast forward a few years and she showed me a picture of a dog at a local rescue and asked if I wanted to meet her. We visited with and brought the dog home. Within a day my allergies started going wild. My wife looked at me compassionately and said, “I’m sorry your allergies are so bad.” And then she tenderly leaned in and whispered, “but we’re keeping the dog.”
And we still have her. There are pictures on our Discord if you want to join us to talk about games and other topics, like pets.
Today’s review is of Super Kawaii Pets designed by William Cavaglieri, illustrated by Pit Baldris, Steano dell’Aria and Hiyoaratory and published by Arcane Wonders. It plays 1-4 players aged 8 and up in about 20 minutes and shouldn’t trigger anyone’s allergies.
Gameplay Overview:
There are three main types of cards in Super Kawaii Pets: Pets, Helpers, and Location cards. On a player’s turn, they may select two cards from the available pets and helper cards or their face-down decks.
Then, they may take as many of the following actions as they can:
• Play an animal card (put it down in front of you) and collect any additional cards that the card grants you
• Flip an animal card to their happy side by paying the required resources in specific help cards including using any two cards to act as any other type of card.
• Obtain a location card by assigning the required number of happy animal cards to it. Happy pets with the star icons are wild.
Play continues until someone has 10 horizontal cards (counting both happy animals and locations). Players continue to take turns until everyone has had the same number of turns and then the game is scored with players scoring the points on the cards in front of them as well as gaining a bonus 3 points for having the most of each of the three colors (ties result in multiple players earning 1 point each instead). Played and still unhappy animals will subtract 1 point each. Highest score wins.
Game Experience:
The pet theme and the art drew me to this game, and I knew it was a very simple card game and that’s where it’s most appealing. It’s a quick filler game about making animals happy. The drawback is since you’re trying to make them happy, you’re looking at a lot of sad animals up front. It’s cartoon sad, but whoever hurt the animals to make them need medical attention needs to go swimming with hungry sharks.
At its core, this is a tableau-building game and resource collection game where you need to balance between grabbing pets and the help cards needed to flip them over. At that base level, it’s easily a game children can grasp within a few turns. Where the strategy begins is aiming for specific colors to earn bonus points or playing unhappy animals to draw extra cards to allow you to flip other cards. Meanwhile, the hand size limit adds another layer to the puzzle.
Where the game floundered a bit for me is that a good chunk of the time there’s often an obvious choice to make from the available cards. Often, this is anything that allows you to draw extra cards. There’s a small amount of strategy where the order of operation when playing cards will make a difference but it’s not something that most methodical gamers won’t see. The game is more accessible than deep. But on the flip side, I’ve seen the person with the fewest cards win because they didn’t have any unhappy pets, and they prioritized more valuable opportunities with a quality over quantity methodology.
One mild annoyance was when the pet locations weren’t desirable, there didn’t seem to be a way to work through that deck in a multiplayer game, which added a little bit of time as people built up enough to possibly gain one of the available locations. If you need dogs and only cats and rodents are showing up, that dog bed is going to sit there unoccupied, unloved, and blocking the cardboard box my cats want to Netflix and chill in.
The game is easy to teach, plays quickly, and has a very accessible theme. I imagine this would be a hit with a broad variety of people. It could easily be in a lot of people’s rotations for small and light card games like Sleeping Queens and Sushi Go. Quibbles aside, I enjoy the game and can see it surviving several culls based on its size and overall accessibility.
Final Thoughts:
Much like pet fish, Super Kawaii Pets is small and cute but not as fun as a more interactive pet (like dogs). The game is cute and fun enough and gave opportunities to feel clever when cards combos happened. At the same time, I also felt like many of the paths were fairly obvious based on what was in front of me, making it less satisfying than some other smaller box games like Sushi Go or even Star Wars Rivals.
Final Score: 3 Stars – Small and cute game with a gateway gamer-friendly decision space that may only hold some gamers’ attention for about as long as a cat chasing a laser.
Hits:
• Plays fast
• Gateway friendly
• Adorable art and theme
Misses:
• Sad pets make me sad
• Limited decision space makes it feel on rails
• Hard to clear out undesirable locations
