Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game - review of the adaptation of the computer classic for the hardcore gamers
The computer-based Zoo Tycoon (from 2001, in case you were feeling too young) is a legend among building strategies that you can finally try in board game form. Be warned, though, Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game is not the kind of uncomplicated fun for the whole family that the cover and artwork might suggest. That's because the cheerful zoo on the box, the animal-shaped wooden figures and the age 13+ on the packaging suggest that this will be just the sort of family-friendly, relaxed game where you can build enclosures and raise animals with your kids. And that really isn't the case.
It's a dense Euro game with virtually no dice rolling, where you do build enclosures in the zoo and put animals in them, but instead of a relaxing experience you've got a full-on grind where you'll be fighting for every winning point on the leaderboard. There are even three of these - the two main ones (conservation and popularity) which determine the ultimate winner of the game, and then education, which doesn't win the game on its own but gives you extra points towards the other two.
Interestingly, your final score corresponds to the scale where you have the least points, so you have to collect points in everything, ideally evenly, and so it's not possible to leave any of the components out completely.
Learning the rules is a long game in itself. Explaining all the mechanics in a YouTube video usually takes around one to two hours, and the game time is roughly twice as long. It has to be said that despite the density of the rules and a bunch of micromanagement, the game does flow quite well and in two players (after a few games, of course) you'll get to the 2-3 hours indicated on the box.
I'll try to briefly describe the rules so you understand the basic mechanics, but don't drown in the text, because there are so many different rules. Plus, the game doesn't go completely player friendly, because a lot of similar things have unnecessarily different rules.
For example, there are four types of boxes (animal shelters and various contact points for visitors) that you place in enclosures, some of which score the same way, others differently, which is where the iconography gets confusing, as it is the same for the boxes that score differently.
Furthermore, these patterns are spread out over three pages of rules and it's only in the fourth game that we finally get to experience them and start playing the game properly, so beware of this and I wish you'd figure this part of the game out as soon as possible and not get lost in the different but similar systems.
Seven years, four seasons
The game is divided into seven rounds, which have four phases according to the seasons. In spring, a random event card is drawn (which might be bird flu or a popular movie at the cinema about animals that get bonus popularity) and then the babies are born. This is the only mechanic of the game where dice are rolled (offspring are simply no sure thing).
The summer follows, when animals are bought or sold at the auction, with the amount of each species offered and demanded changing from year to year. Since we're playing as zoos and not smugglers, all animals are free (thematically there are exchanges between zoos around the world), you're just limited to two transactions per round as a player.
This is where the first tactic comes in, because there won't always be enough animals available to open an enclosure right away (each species has a set lower limit on the number of animals). Will you take a chance and stockpile them, knowing that they won't be of any use to you this round and hoping that they will be on offer next round? Or would you rather take an "inferior" animal, but one that will immediately entertain visitors? Of course, you also have the option to buy animals that you don't need but don't want your opponents to get.
In the autumn, shops and enclosures are built and the purchased animals are released into them, which in practice is much more complicated than this simple sentence would suggest, because each field and each animal changes many things: the happiness of the animals in the enclosure, the maintenance of the zoo, the enthusiasm of the visitors and, depending on the surrounding buildings, your final score (whether it is conservation, education or popularity). And fall is logically followed by winter, when you mainly count points, pay taxes, and receive admission revenue for the next year.
Tough zoo care
It may not sound like a lot of tasks, but considering that you'll be doing this for virtually every interaction in the zoo, and ideally several times per round, and it's not exactly an immersive activity, it's a bit exhausting.
What's completely off-putting for me, though, is the fact that Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game is for up to four players, but even playing with two we found ourselves running out of animals in the last few rounds. And we were each keeping different ones. In theory, each of the four players can breed the same kind of animal, but when one is able to use up the game's supply, something is wrong.
So there aren't a few in the box at all, but in short, there should have been more so that their limitations wouldn't have come so easily. Luckily, all those different types of animals are housed in their own printed paper boxes, which help with clarity and fit nicely in the box. If it weren't for one huge BUT.
There are no compartments in the box for the enclosure boxes, which realistically represent half of the tokens, so it's a terrible mess anyway. When I searched the internet for what I should ideally do with that mound of tokens so that I wouldn't have to hunt them down from all corners of the box after carrying the game, I found that it was a mistake on the part of the creators who forgot to put the intended pouches in the box. Which, for a game in this price range, is a bit disappointing when you have to help yourself from elsewhere...
Zoo: no children allowed
I can only recommend Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game to a very specific group of board gamers who regularly meet in "closed company", play challenging pieces and enjoy dense strategies. Because it's a game with virtually no randomness, it's purely about understanding the systems and gradually mastering and using them, which you'll demonstrate in the winning strategy.
After the first few games, you'll find that the lion and otter are over-powered animals that you want to have from the very first round, and you're already thinking about where to place the food stalls (or not even thinking, because you're using the optimal layout from the last game). In a closed group, where each player has equal experience with the game, it's a thrilling, evenly matched competition where you each know what the ideal zoo should look like and you have to really tactically market the animals to make your plans happen.
But throwing a newbie in with the experienced players is just beating a dead horse, at least for the first few games. By the very logic of the matter, this is not a relaxing game to pull out for an evening with friends, let alone a family who may be logically tempted by building a zoo, but it's where it hits a nasty patch of difficulty.
It's no comfort that for some reason the authors have thought to print the scoring board and the exchange on A3-sized cardboard boards, so the game takes up many times more space on the table than would realistically be needed. So you really need a proper family dining table to play on.
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