New York Zoo

Product Information

Players start with a blank board, a dirt covered empty lot where their zoo enclosures and attractions will soon begin springing up from. Players move an elephant, the shared placement marker around the board, up to four spaces in a two player game, where the elephant stops means that player can take the top polyomino enclosure tile or the two animals depicted on the space. The enclosures get added, and then if you have open enclosures, you add the penguins, flamingos, arctic foxes, meerkats and tree kangaroos. You’ve got a little holding pen area, a green room for animals, to the side as well – if you need to hold on to one of the critters you’ve just acquired. I first became aware of Uwe Rosenburg’s New York Zoo in an online video highlighting the top upcoming releases to watch out for. Uwe’s design, polyominoes and the most adorable animeeples...Sign. Me. Up. New York Zoo is immediately a very attractive game. The meeples, the tiles and the main zoo board are all of high quality and look and feel good. What I really enjoy is the choice of animal meeples that they went with. I certainly didn’t have any Arctic fox or Red kangaroo meeples before! It matters what others do on their turns, at least some of the time. When breeding occurs on someone else’s turn there is almost an excitement, derived from someone else triggering that for you rather than the other way around. The rest of the game feels very much like a multiplayer solitaire experience. The other players can take tiles you want and will move the elephant around the rondel but otherwise it’s all about the puzzle in front of you.

New York Zoo - Capstone Games

Video games paved the way with various “theme” games, but board games are following their path and there are several available on the market. In this article, we take a look at the Top 5 Zoo Board Games currently. The theme is zoo-ish … if you stretch it a bit. You play as an imp family, starting a business of breeding and selling pets. But these are no ordinary pets – they are to be sold to Dungeon Lords (incidentally, this is also the title of the prequel) to work in their, well, dungeons. Therefore, you’ve got all sorts of magical monsters you can breed. Take the 1 player, player board. Use the side of your choice. Set up the action strip like the 2 player fast game. The tiles removed from the top of the enclosure piles are then returned to the box, not placed on the player board. You then take the 5 range markers. These are marked thus 0, 1, 2, 3, 4+. Great online store for board games. They always arrive perfectly and undamaged which is important to me.Set-up is relatively straightforward. All of the adorable meeples need to be placed in their respective piles. You take a game board, dependent on your player count, and take the starting meeples indicated by your board. Of course, this is a high level view of the game. If you’d like to see how the game is played, then continue reading. Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Setup

New York Zoo | Board Games | Zatu Games UK

It is possible that adding one (or both) of these animals to your Enclosure tiles might cause those tiles to become full. To avoid duplication, I’ll talk about what to do when this happens in the next section. Breeding In New York Zoo, the players take on the roles of developers as they work to construct animal parks and fill them with various animals and Attractions. Each player begins the game with an empty zoo board and a couple of animals. On their turn, they will either choose from a selection of polyomino tiles to add to their boards as animal Enclosures or choose from a selection of animals to add to their boards in an effort to fill their already existing Enclosures. For a regular Joe or Jane like me, zoos are pretty much the only place we can see exotic animals live and up close. However morally questionable they are (the animals are held in captivity after all), they are also a valuable asset in animal research in preservation. If you’re after one animal, in particular, you may also land on an available animal space and instead of taking the two animals shown on that space, take any ONE animal of your choice. This can be handy when you’re getting close to completing an enclosure or the animal you seek is about to breed! Many famous tile placing games have been created by Uwe Rosenberg with some being the highest-rated and beloved games in history. Most of these are much heavier games than I’m interested in, but I can appreciate the love for games like Agricola, A Feast for Odin and La Havre. His other, lighter, polyomino games like Patchwork and Cottage Garden have been enjoyable. New York Zoo falls somewhere in between, limiting the length of analysis paralysis (woohoo!) on each turn that tends to plague me in more complex games. No need to worry about counting victory points, planning for epic scoring combos, or thinking twelve steps ahead to build up enough resources for that elusive L-shaped polyomino. The goal of New York Zoo is simple and straightforward, fill every space on your player board with Tetris-like pieces, representing animal enclosures and attractions, before anyone else.You can only breed in up to 2 enclosures within your zoo at a time and breeding happens simultaneously for all players. On successful breeding, you can also add a further animal from one of the houses, if you have one, to that enclosure.

NEW YORK ZOO - Capstone Games NEW YORK ZOO - Capstone Games

To place a tile into your zoo board, you must also have an animal to place into that enclosure. This can either be from the three holding enclosures on the top left of your board, or you may relocate an animal from another enclosure, so long as you don’t leave an enclosure empty. This is usually the part where I would dive right in talking about the artwork and components, but there’s one glaring thing about New York Zoo that really bugs me that I want to talk about first: the theme. Full disclosure: I am an Uwe Rosenberg nerd. As of this writing I own 38 distinct titles by him. So take that as a confession that I tend to view his creations through rose-tinted glasses. When I find out that Uwe is releasing a new game, I get excited and very rarely am I let down once I finally get my hands on it. So, bear that in mind as you read my thoughts on New York Zoo. New York Zoo is a fantastic game which blends his Uwe Rosenberg's well-known animal breeding mechanics with his polyomino puzzle system for a wonderful gameplay experience.

A game all about creating a peaceful garden using grids and tiles by the equally great Michael Keisling. If you liked the puzzle element most, it’s worth a trip to the zoo. Ultimately though, we were a little underwhelmed. Like the sardonically gazing animals on the cover of the box, we felt a little detached, cynical, and nonplussed when someone completed their zoo and won. Unlike a lot of other games where you’ve building a little scene in front of you, there’s just not that joy of looking down at the end of the game, regardless of whether you win or not and being happy with what’s been made. You’re not going to be greeted with a full zoo of interesting animals, walkways and otherwise like you may expect. Instead, if you’ve been playing efficiently, there’s probably a mess of amusements and a lot of empty pens – as you return your animals for those bonus tiles. Along the way, certain animals will breed and produce offspring which are added to existing Enclosures. When an Enclosure is filled, the animals present on it are removed and the player can then add an Attraction tile to their board. And this is important because the goal of the game is to be the first player to fill in your board entirely and those Attraction tiles will help you fill in the holes left by your Enclosure tile placements. Animal breeding happens after tile/animal selection and placement, so it may happen that multiple players will fill in their boards as a result of this. If this occurs, the tie is broken by whoever has the most animals remaining. For some, there’s going to be a game they love here – a puzzle of abstraction with a theme that doesn’t matter. For us, it was just the shrug of an unimpressed kangaroo. With 127 cute wooden animal meeples, this game also features adorable artwork with simple easy-to-learn rules.