The name probably ruined the surprise, but in the 2007 Spiel des Jahres winner Zooleretto, 2-5 players take on the challenging task of building a kick-ass zoo.
Zooloretto is a game with a lot of stuff. Here’s what a box contains: 16 offspring tiles; 88 animals tiles; 12 vending stall tiles; 12 coin tiles; 30 coins; five zoo boards with an expansion board each; five delivery truck boards; one bag (to keep the tiles in); round wooden disk; five rules summary cards, and a rule booklet. What a haul!
Each player starts the game with a zoo board…but no animals. Not surprisingly then, the goal is to fill your zoo board with animal tiles. The zoo boards have three pens on them, and later in the game you can pay to add a fourth if you wish. Each pen holds a different number of animals, and only one animal type can be placed in a single pen.
Onto the gameplay. In the centre of the table are placed the delivery trucks, one per player. Each truck has space on it for three tiles. The game begins, and players take it in turns to draw a tile from the bag and put it on any empty space on any truck. Most of the tiles depict an animal of some sort (there are eight different types – panda, flamingo, zebra, leopard, kangaroo, elephant, chimpanzee and camel), but mixed in with them are the coin tiles and the vending stall tiles.
At any point, rather than putting another tile on a truck, a player can choose to take one of the trucks and loot the contents. If you do so you get to put the animals on that truck into any of your pens where there is space (but without putting more than one type of animal into each pen). If you have no space for an animal tile, it goes in your barn, to hopefully be added to a pen later. Coins add to your funds, and vending stalls go on one of the four designated spots on your zoo board.
If you pick up a truck, play skips you until the other players have also taken a truck.
Instead of drawing an animal tile or picking up a truck you can: move an animal tile from one pen to another; exchange one type of animal tile for another; purchase an animal tile from an another player; discard an animal tile, or expand your zoo by buying an extra pen. Each of these actions costs a certain number of coins, from one to three.
Zooloretto ends when the bag becomes empty. At this point each player tots up their score, which is counted in coins. Animals in pens get you coins, and full pens get you extra coins. Vending stall tiles give you two coins each. Highest score wins!
- Number of players: 2-5
- Age of players: 8+
- Length: 45 minutes
Extensions for Zooloretto:
