Night at the Zoo
- Board's Eye View
- 1 minute ago
- 2 min read
Designed by Tomás Holek and published by Albi, Night at the Zoo is a tile drafting game where the 1-4 players are building paths to return escaped animals back to the zoo (ie: moving from the edges of a player's board to the zoo gate in the centre of their boards). You play using three different types of animal from the six in the core game and four more in the Night at the Zoo: Latecomers expansion, and each type of animal moves and scores in its own unique way. This means in practice that some animals are harder to play with than others, so your choice of which animals to play with also sets the difficulty level of the game. Whichever animals you choose to play with, each player will have three of each of them set up around the edge of their individual player boards.
In each of three rounds, players will be drafting five terrain tiles from a display. You'll mostly place these on your individual board. The tiles you draft will give you set collection points or specific actions, and you also get to take actions and/or score points indicated on your board when you cover a space with a tile that meets that space's requirements (for example, being a tile of a specific colour). Among the actions on tiles and on your board will be the opportunity to draft additional 'plain' terrain tiles (ie: tiles that don't have an action symbol printed on them) and the abilty to move an animal from its starting point on the edge of your board, provided there's a path of placed tiles that that animal can take that corresponds with the animal's movement rules. As an alternative to placing a tile, however, you can always discard a tile to trigger movement of all animals on terrain tiles matching the terrain of the discarded tiles.
The range of choices, both over drafting and placement, make Night at the Zoo a fascinating puzzle optimisation game. It is satisfying to play because every tile and placement is potentially beneficial, but winning comes down to maximising the effectiveness of the tiles you draft by planning ahead and, in effect, programming productive sequences of actions.
Night at the Zoo is easy to learn and play - tho' not so easy to play well! - and it's attractively presented with art by Tereza Kovandová. The game works at all player counts and it plays in around 30-45 minutes, depending on the number of players. And tho' the Latecomers expansion adds more variety in the form of additional animals from which to choose, the expansion doesn't complicate gameplay by introducing additional rules.