Zooloretto was a bit of a random purchase. It looked cute (to attract the 8yr olds eye) and sounded complex enough to keep me happy (basically anything below Monopoly level)
Out comes one of those huge reinforced cardboard boxes that a tank would struggle to crush, inside we found a load of silver counters, one red one, some wood ‘things’ (later to be revealed as trucks) and a whole heap of those loverly thick card pieces ready to be popped out from the holders. One thing thats odd about this game is that its setup for a max five players rather than four or six but other than that its filled with your standard flamingos, pandas, elephants and other assorted animals. Yes its a game all about being Bob Fossil and running a zoo so slip on your over tight baby blue suit and follow me.
All players start with a zoo board piece, two coins and an expansion board bit. Arranged around you should be a whole stack of tiles in piles and ready to randomly pick up. Ready? BEGIN.
Player one picks up a tile, looks at it then puts it on a truck (one for each player but not belonging to a player) the tile will either be an animal, a coin or vendor (popcorn, hotdogs or the like). Play passes around while each play picks up a tile and put it on any truck they feel or you spend coins to take actions (eg move animals, buy upgrades) or take a truck.
This is part of the cunning bit, you can load up a truck with stuff you want or load a truck that something someone else ones with junk. As you have to fill pens with animals of only one type and you only have a couple of pens, you then have to stuff animals in a barn but they end up costing you points at the end. You can pay coins to ‘remove’ animals (off to the glue factory then?) but the idea of the game is to only take the truck you want each turn or you end up with animals you can’t shift. Other people can buy them from your barn but they need cash and may want to spend on something more important.
As the stacks diminish you become frantic for the last few animals or hope you can breed a pair to fill your pens without over flowing then at the end scoring is based on how full the pens are (full points for a full pen, less if one animal is missing, no points for less animals) any vending stalls you have and minus points for the potential superglue stuck in the barn.
We loved playing this but the first game or two was a bit wonky with the scoring. Some of the examples are a bit wooly and you have to watch the semantics on the scoring method. eg You score for the number of different types of vending stalls not the actual number of vending stalls. Like the other Rio Grande games we have, the rulebook is paper thin and easy to digest but it took a few play throughs to get the exact scoring method right at the end.
As ever, here is the ubiquitous link to boardgamegeek
:EDIT:
This update is about a year after the initial writeup and we still play it on a regular basis. We have the game down to a point where we can run a game in around half an hour and still have time to goof around while playing, but something occurred to me while playing today. At any point you can pay two coins to ‘remove a tile’ so you can discard an animal from your barn or one of the pens. But what does discard mean? Unlike if you sell it to another player the card is removed from the game so does the animal get dragged around the back of the barn, have a shotgun placed against it head and its brains blown out? Kind of harsh for the animal and somewhat against the grain of the game which involves an number of endangered species like Pandas.