When PisecoDad made a special trip to our nearest game store (an hour away!) to “use up” some coupons (cue George Carlin voice: I’m saving MONEY! ) the big box game he returned with was Zooloretto.
Zooloretto won the 2007 Spiel des Jahres, which is the biggest Game of the Year award, so you know right off the bat there are plenty of people who enjoy it. (Other SdJ games on our shelves include ‘05 Niagara, ‘04 Ticket to Ride, ‘03 Alhambra, ‘01 Carcassonne, ‘99 Tikal, ‘98 Elfenland, and of course ‘95 Settlers.) Zooloretto is a medium weight tile-laying and set-collecting based game. It’s pretty easy and quick to learn and explain (unlike, say, Colosseum!) but there is a reasonable amount of decision-making and strategy, so it’s not a fluff game. PisecoDad and I played the two-player variant first, which has just a few tweaks so that it works out well for two.
Each player has a zoo board with enclosures for the animals. (Click on it to see a bigger image.) On your turn you can choose one of three actions:
1. Flip over a tile from the main stacks and place it onto a “delivery truck” (that three-space wooden rack). You can place the tile you’ve flipped on any delivery truck (there are an equal number of trucks and players).
2. Spend your silver coins to move, exchange, discard or buy tiles, or to buy an expansion (here, the enclosure with the elephants is the expansion).
3. Choose to take one of the delivery trucks (with at least one tile on it) to your zoo. Doing this ends your participation in the round, and you can’t continue spending money or flipping tiles. When you choose a truck, you immediately place any tiles on it onto your zoo board.
The round ends when each player has chosen a truck. Placement rules are simple enough - only one type of animals in an enclosure. You can place any number of animals in your barn, but if they’re still there at the end of the game, you lose points. The rules about exchanging animals between enclosures become strategic because filling up an enclosure can earn you money during the game, and more points at the end of the game. There is also an extra rule that “breeding pairs” - tiles with male or female symbols next to the animals - can produce offspring. The rule book section about offspring produced my favorite sentence of the day:
Important: pairs only produce offspring in enclosures, not in barns or on delivery trucks.
On delivery trucks?
We enjoyed the game - it was quick to learn and moved along fairly well during gameplay. There were only one or two turns when we had to sit and puzzle out if we could use our exchanges to our advantage, but they didn’t drag the game on too long. Of course our whole family enjoyed the theme - we’re animal lovers here - and it seemed second nature to JediBoy that you can’t put leopards in with pandas. A few of the game’s subtleties were hard to explain to JediBoy (we played a three-player game later with him), but he caught on well and (thanks to one well-timed hint from me) tied PisecoDad for, er, second place.
So, Zooloretto was a hit with the PisecoClan, and we’re looking forward to playing it again with friends, to see how different it feels with a full table of 5 players.
Categories:
