Pros

This game is just an amazing form factor, with a tiny box filled with bright, great feeling components. Art all fits this tranquil feeling, with even river bugs featured.

Kawa is all about flow though, and you’ll find your eyes constantly analyzing all the different paths downstream. Since you can swap any 2 tiles, as long as they’re adjacent to one another, this allows for ridiculous possibilities of paths to place your petals, or avoid your opponents’.

There’s also whirlpools that add some chaos, where once you go through them, they rotate clockwise, permanently modifying the river for anyone else who wants to go down.

Some decisionmaking also comes in with the Double Petal, where you can 2x points from others passing through you, but you only have one of these tokens and must place them carefully. In fact, at the end of each round comes some neat decisionmaking, where you have to choose to remove 2 Petals anywhere you want on the map. Take into account how everything is flowing downstream too!

Replayability gets cemented with all of the 9 different variant cards to replace some parts of the river. There’s a Dragon that lets you swap any Whirlpool with any tile. Or an ‘Abandoned Katana’ that lets you choose your paths while flowing through.

The ‘Overgrown Shrine’ is the coolest, that entirely changes point scoring by gives players points for spaces where they have the most petals! This is an insane amount of points with 16 tiles, that causes players to think differently.

Overall, Kawa excels of being game literally of flow by constantly having this flow downstream, gracing your own Petals to scatter your vivid colors on the river. It never feels hard to imagine your Petals swirling and floating.

Cons & Nitpicks

We were quite upset at the rulebooks though, with a LOT of room for confusion. It’s wordy in an unnecessary way, that could have easily used symbols when talking about Petals. Perhaps there’s some translation issues going on. Like, there’s not even a tiebreaker, or what happens when someone scores more than 18 points, ‘Overgrown Shrine’ I’m looking at you.

For being a game trying to be about chill, the actual turn structure pattern is BIG. These 3 phases ironically don’t flow well, and may prevent you from hitting a good flow of mind. Like, in Phase 2, you swap any two tiles in REVERSE player order. Then Phase 3 has you going to the NORMAL player order to take Petals off the board. During that phase, you gotta change the river as it flows down, take back your Lily Pad, and move the entire board downstream.

During all of this, you only got to flow down the river once. The juiciest part of the game, a swapping of tiles to actually begin the flow your petals, is shrouded with other bookkeeping. In short, you’re not flowing that much of the time.

We also see a huge capacity for players to completely clock out when behind, where if you’re losing by around 5 points, there’s basically zero way to catch up. You’ll know you’re losing because of the open information, and then you’re left to kingmake. There’s no engine to build up, and little to no combos, especially if you’re playing without the added variants. Maybe something like a token with 3 Petals on it, that gave 3 points, would allow for swings.

Then, going first in the first round is generally worse, because it means that you flow last in the round! On the first round, everyone else will take their turns, put down their Petals, and you’re likely to run into them, giving them points, while no one ran into yours this round because you placed Petals last. There’s only 4 rounds, so a first player could get majorly screwed over for 2 rounds, in a game with no comeback possibility. Getting the 1st player position last is just better.