With the weekend nearly over, having spent most of it at the in-laws celebrating a joint birthday for Maya and her cousin Anusha, we decided to use up the rest of the Sunday afternoon/early evening playing some games. Firstly I grabbed an old favourite that hasn't been played in a while, Zooleretto. It has been some time since we last played this and I, and probably all of us, had forgot how much we enjoyed it. The premise of the game is to build and run the most successful Zoo - each player starts with a zoo board with three locations for animals, a 6 animal spot, a 5 animal spot and a 4 animal spot. There is also a Barn on the board for spare animals that cannot be located. 15 tiles are also separated from the bag and placed aside for the End Game.
Each player receives a "lorry" - a wooden container with three slots. These are placed in the middle of the table and a black bag is passed around from which the player draws a tile and places it on one of the free slots on a wooden lorry. The tiles could be an animal (elephant, tiger, panda etc), a coin for financial deals (the player starts with 2) or a Refreshment Stand.
The lorries gradually fill up, with players trying to place animals and other tiles in a combination that they want but hope no one else wants. Play continues, with drawing of tiles, until a player decides they want a particular lorry - at this point, they pass on the bag without drawing and simply take the lorry of their choice - this can be a lorry with one, two or all three spaces filled.
Once the player has taken a lorry, they take the tiles and either place them in empty animal spots (the same animal can only go into the same enclosure - no flamingoes into the tiger pen, as much as we want to!), into their own money supply or as a refreshment stand for an enclosure. If the player has no room for an animal tile (or more), then that spare animal has to go into the Barn. Animals in the Barn cause negative points at the end of the game.
Each enclosure has two point values (well three actually) - a Full value, a Only One To Go value and Only a Few Animals + A Refreshment. This sounds complex, but in reality it isn't.
For example, the 1st Enclosure with 6 animal spaces scores 10/6 - this means if you fill it with 6 pandas for example, you get 10 points at the end of the game - only 5 pandas, you get 6 points at the end of the game. If you say for example put in only 3, but you have a Refreshment Stall in the bottom right of the enclosure, the player is allowed 1 point per animal e.g. 3 points in this case. No Refreshment Stall = 0 points!
So the aim is to fill those enclosures - some enclosures also give coins for filling them up; coins can be used to open up a new 5 space enclosure, buy animals from other players Barns (1 coin to them, 1 to the bank), remove an animal from your own barn etc etc. It's all down to management of the Zoo as well as picking the animals, but it's done on a very simple level that even Maya can appreciate. That's not to say its too simple for adults.
Animals can also have offspring, for example some animal tiles come with a Male and Female symbol, which when placed in the same enclosure, produces a small round baby animal tile which can be used to bolster an enclosure number. Animals can only be paired once, so a new male or female would need a new male or female tile to produce a 2nd child tile.
Finally, when all of the tiles are used up, the tiles from the 15 separate ones are used for 1 round then the game ends.
Scoring is based on the following:
Successful filling of enclosures;
Number of similar refreshment types = 2 points per type (eg three apple carts = 1 type = 2 points)
Number of similar animal types in the barn = -2 points per type (eg 1 camel, 2 tigers, 2 pandas = 3 different types = -6 points).
This is a highly enjoyable game to play and the final winner is hard to determine until right until the end. It's loved by every one in the family and they are always up for a game. It's full of strategy and management that's not too hard to handle, so fun for everyone!
Afterwards we also had a game of 7 Wonders just because we love it so much! It's hard to think we'll ever find a game to replace it!
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