Building a Zoo Nobody Will Ever Visit

Set the board up on the fold-down and there wasn’t much table left for anything else, coffee cup had to sit on the windowsill. That’s the first thing worth saying, this thing is a table hog for a two-hander, the association board and the main board together eat more real estate than the cabin really wants to give up. Weighed it before it went up too, heaviest game I carried this season by a fair margin, and I don’t regret it but I felt every ounce on the last mile.

It’s a zoo builder, cards give you animals and actions and money that’s represented by little black cardboard squares, which reads cheap next to how good the rest of the production is, somebody clearly ran out of budget or interest right at the currency. The card pool is enormous, something like two million possible combinations if you believe the box, and after a dozen solo plays I still hadn’t repeated a strategy, always some new build around reptiles or a petting zoo wing I hadn’t tried. The iconography took real effort though, more than the included reference sheet wants to admit, I had the app pulled up on my phone half the early games just to check what a symbol meant, which felt backwards for a game about watching wildlife.

Theme is a mixed bag depending who you ask, some players find the whole zoo premise thin once you’re just converting icons to reputation points, others say completing a conservation project and releasing animals back into the wild is the best moment in the box. I land with the second group, mostly, though I’ll admit at three in the morning with a radio check due at six it can feel like pure spreadsheet. Solo mode, official and well supported, is what actually got this into the pack. Works fine at two. I wouldn’t want to run it at four up here even if I had the bodies, the downtime alone would eat the whole evening watching for smoke.