Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Another Evening of Board Games... Zooloretto

On the second evening of the Jones' Easter visit, I pulled out a game that I bought over a year ago when it won the German "Game of the Year" prize and went on sale cheap cheap.
The theme of this game is that the players are each zoo owners, and we are competing to fill our zoos with animals in order to attract the most patrons.

Each player starts with an empty zoo and 2 coins. In the centre of the board are delivery trucks (1 per player) and a pool of tiles.
When it is a players turn, they can either:

1) Draw a tile and load it on a truck (each truck has a capacity of 3)
2) take a truck with at least 1 tile and drive it to their zoo
3) do something with money (expand zoo etc)

The tiles that are drawn can either be an animal, a concession booth, or more money. Here Claudia draws a tile and places it on a truck.
It is a pretty light game and it was easy for everyone to understand the rules quite quickly. There is a little more to it, lsuch as managing animals in the barn and pairing fertile animals to have babies, but it is not at all complex.

Here is my Zoo near the end of the first game. I had a completely unreasonable strategy of ensuring I had lots and lots of Pandas. There was no real reason for this other than I like Pandas.
Ryan and Claudia seemed to take to this game quite quickly. Look at them coming up with evil zoo plans.
As the first game finished, it looked like Doris had won, but in fact I(all my fault) had counted the points wrong and it was Claudia's zoo who won. Look how Claudia displayed fine sportsmanship as the morally crushed Doris sadly clutches a panda.
Ryan seemed to have some special zoo skills and managed to win the next two games. Another bonus is that this game moves very fast, so we were able to try it a few times.
It turns out my "must have lots of pandas at all costs" strategy was not a good one as I came dead last in every single game. As a forfeit, I tried to pose like a sad panda on the box with a pretzel.
I could not quite get sad going since I kept giggling though...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awww, the days of staying up all night drinking beer and playing Magik, have been replaced by Pandas.

Rick Springfield

Anonymous said...

this was a lot of fun
The doris

Fraser Anderson said...

Well Rick Springield...

you can laugh all you want. I enjoyed magic in its time just as I love all my geeking.