Of course, zoos made their way into gaming. Working at a zoo is a dream job for many, after all. And games allow you to focus on the fun parts of it, rather than the mundane everyday routines and long hours. But in games, it’s about planning your zoo layout, building pens, taking care of animals and visitors, and making money. The main zoo board is placed in the middle of the play area and the polyomino tiles placed in the little gaps, according to their colour lightest green to darkest green. Take your time with this, as getting any of the shapes in the wrong spots may cause the game to be slightly unbalanced. Life in the big city has its merits: you’re surrounded by interesting people, there’s always something to do, and everything you could ever want or need is within just a few miles of your home. Well, almost everything. All of that industrialization and build-up comes at a cost. The rolling fields of grass and trees have given way to towering skyscrapers and housing developments. Sometimes in the midst of all of that concrete and steel you want to get in touch with nature again, to see and experience the world’s natural beauty, to step outside of the day-to-day experience. Sometimes you need a trip to the zoo. Overview In New York Zoo, a 1-5 player eurogame designed by Uwe Rosenberg and published by Feverland, you take on the role of zoo designers. You are competing to build New York Zoo? Or a part of New York Zoo? Ok, it’s not clear, but you’re building something Zoo like. New York isn’t relevant, it could be called Cromer Zoo or just Zoo Builder. Your goal is to place geometric tiles, representing animal enclosures or attractions, onto your player board until all the spaces are filled. This is how you play it. Set-Up

New York Zoo - Capstone Games

Though gameplay initially seems simple (and it is really easy to grasp) with just two options on your turn, the choices you make need to be strategic and carefully planned, because as well as filling up your zoo with enclosures and attractions, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got enough animals in your various enclosures when it’s breeding time! Let’s FlaminGO 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. 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. The third game in the Azul series keeps the tile-selection mechanic of Azul and Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, but has an entirely new placement mechanic, as players try to fill out the seven stars on their individual boards, but have to discard varying quantities of tiles to place on each open space. The tile colors all score differently, and you get more points for placing tiles where they’re adjacent to ones you’ve already placed. One color serves as a wild tile in each round as well, making it easier to get things done than in the previous two games. It plays longer given how much more real estate you’re trying to cover, and neither sequel has quite lived up to the original, but it’s still a good game to grab if you enjoy the core Azul mechanics as much as we do.

The best heavy (or complex) game of the year comes from the co-designer of Tzolk’in and designer of Teotihuacan, both also involved, crunchy games with lots of parts and many different options for actions and scoring. Tekhenu is as rich as those other games, but replaces worker placement with dice drafting, instead restricting what dice you can take when through the rotation of the obelisk, which puts some dice in sunlight and others in shade or darkness. Tekhenu allows for multiple strategies, but one part you can’t skip are the game’s three types of cards, which can award one-time bonuses, ongoing abilities, or significant points at game end. 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! As soon as the tile is placed onto your board, you MUST move at least one animal into the Enclosure. This animal can come from one of your houses or even one of your other Enclosure tiles (as long as moving that animal does not cause the tile it is moving from to become empty). This, of course, means that you cannot add an Enclosure tile to your board if there are no animals that you can legally add to it. A maximum of 2 animals can be added to a newly placed Enclosure, but they must come from different places. This player has elected to move flamingos from existing flamingo Enclosures onto the newly placed tile.

New York Zoo Review - Just Push Start New York Zoo Review - Just Push Start

Uwe Rosenberg is often a certain type of gamer’s favourite designer. Best known for Agricola (or Feast for Odin) and maybe most loved for Le Havre, the designer, not to put a too fine point on it, has form. So when we finally got our hands on a copy of New York Zoo, we arrived with high expectations.

Setup

Sadly not one of Rosenberg’s classics, but certainly an appealing little puzzle for fans of the designer. Come for the pleasing puzzle, but don’t think too much about the theme.

Zoo Board Games in 2023 | Victory Conditions 5 Best Zoo Board Games in 2023 | Victory Conditions

If the elephant passes a breeding spot, anyone with those animals in their enclosures get to add a couple more. Once you’ve completed an enclosure you return those animals and take any amusement tile of your choice. These are your popcorn stands and other human distractions – the sizes and variety of these means that you’re able to fill the gaps left by your polyomino pieces. Which is important as the first player to fill in their board wins. New York Zoo is a race to the finish line. You’ll want to fill up your construction board as fast as you can, but as you need to place an animal in every enclosure you acquire you’ll want to keep an eye on your animal population too. Plus, as mentioned, filling animal enclosures is the only way to get your hands on the smallest tiles that’ll fill any potential gaps you’ll have! Penguins and Meerkats and Roo’s, Oh My! The aim of New York Zoo is not to score points, nor is it to breed animals. The winner is simply the first player to completely fill their zoo board with tiles. Of course players are dragged one way and another by the options and possibilities. One minute players will be focused on the end goal of filling their board and all of a sudden they will be distracted by breeding animals, thanks to the bonuses. In a 2- or 3-player game, at least 1 successful breeding of the specified animal type will trigger an additional breeding in a different Enclosure than any that have been added to so far during the current breeding so long as that Enclosure contains at least 2 animals. Thoughts Take an enclosure piece, from the top of that spaces pile, and place it into your zoo. Enclosures can be placed anywhere on your board as long as the piece doesn’t overlap another or hang off the end of your play area. Once placed they cannot be moved. There is a further consideration. You can only play an enclosure onto your board if you can put an animal into it, so you will need one in 1 of your houses. Or you can move an animal from another enclosure, as long as you don’t empty that enclosure.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. The New York Zoo, a place where the wild meets civilisation. A gallery of living art where nature is the only subject. Your role is to design the perfect mix of animal enclosures and attractions to ensure you fill your respective plot of land. The first player to do this wins. The rest? They have to make do with half-finished plots, where flamingos can pray on the unwary penguins and the meerkats and kangaroos form gangs to bully the arctic foxes. Well, that’s the fiction in my head, at any rate. Each move of that Elephant pawn is also setting up the turn for the next player in line, so you’ll find yourself trying to calculate which tiles are within their reach and which ones are most likely to help them the least. Do you move the Elephant just enough to keep them from snatching up a tile that would fit into their board perfectly even though it means choosing something suboptimal for yourself or do you leap ahead and grab the thing you really want? Will moving the Elephant trigger a breeding? If so, will you be able to capitalize on it? If not, do you really want to risk triggering a breeding when it may help someone else more than you? These kinds of mental gymnastics become even more pronounced in the 2-player game. If there’s a piece coming up that you want, then you can move the Elephant in such a way to guarantee that your opponent won’t be able to get to it but that regardless of what they choose to do on their turn, they’ll put you within striking distance of the tile on your next one. 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