Zoo Run

Following the story told in my previous post, the second game of the day was Zoo Run.  Another card game technically made for kids, but again, it had an interesting card mechanic that I thought was worth checking out.

It turns out it's two games in one.  That is ALWAYS a bonus for me, when the game developer thinks up more than one use for the components they created.

The first game is about rescuing animals from the enclosure before the mean old zookeeper gets there to stop you.  It looks like this:

The way the cards are played, you get three cards, each showing the front or rear of animals at top, middle and bottom.  Players show their cards at the same time, and arrange them to match as many heads and butts as they can.  At first it looked like it might not always work out, but the rules assured us there will always be at least one match.  Here, I completed an elephant, a wildcat and a panda.

How the game works: a certain number of tokens are put in the enclosure based on how many players there are, and a certain number of path markers that the zookeeper has to travel.  Simple but clever.  For each animal you build, you get to remove a matching token from the enclosure.  Free all the animals before the bad guy gets there.  For the two player game there are 5 animals with 4 tokens each, and the zookeeper has 7 path tiles to cross.  So you have to average two animals per turn.  Which should always be possible, except that if you get a turtle and the turtle tokens are already gone, then whoops, that's a problem.  We lost the first game and won the second by one move.

Flip over the board for the second game, and it cleverly lines up with the art of the box for a little extra flourish.  The second game is a simple race game.

The game developer did a good job of reusing the pieces and adding a few more pieces, while keeping it kid friendly.  Here you get to choose an animal and get a stand-up token of that animal in a little race car.  This time you get four cards, with a clever way of figuring the moves in the race.  For each animal you match, you move one space, but if you match YOUR animal, it counts as two spaces and you get a token from the box.  (The tokens show crowns, and are the unused animal tokens flipped over.)  Also, you get to keep one card at the end of each hand, most likely the one with the most of your token animal's heads or butts on it, giving you the best odds of making your animal again.

The winner is the first one to get to the finish line.  If it's a tie, the one with the most crown tokens wins.  We got faster and faster at making the matches and scoring as we played, and was light-hearted fun.

These were good filler games for an afternoon laugh every now and then.  I think the young players have a way better selection of games than I had when I was a kid, so everybody wins.