May 2007 Archives

Review of Zooloretto in Finnish.

Zooloretto is the latest game in the Coloretto family. This zoo-themed family game is based on a familiar mechanism that works so well in the small card game. This big box board game turned out be another success for Michael Schacht.

A simple idea

The basic idea is the same: there are eight kinds of animals, and players try to collect only some of them. The animals you collect go to your zoo, where you have room for three different kinds of animals (four, if you expand). Extra animals go to your stables, where they'll hurt your score in the end. There's limited room even for those animals you want, so you better be careful.

Players are faced with simple decisions each turn: do you take a cart and the tiles (animals, coins and stalls) in it, or do you draw another tile to add to the carts? There's a cart per player and each cart holds three tiles. If you take a cart, you're out until everybody else has taken a cart and a new round begins.

Of course you try to set yourself up with the best possible carts, but more often it's really about setting other players up with as miserable set as possible. The first turn will be somewhat random, but after that things get interesting. There's a definite mean side to the game!

Additional details

That's the basic mechanism, but there are other things. I mentioned coins: you can use them to expand your zoo, move animals around and buy animals from other players' stables. Collecting coins gives you flexibility. Stalls help with scoring, both by themselves and by allowing the scoring of enclosures with only few animals in them (regularly only full or almost full enclosures score).

Finally, there are babies. Some animals are fertile males, some fertile females (most just aren't fertile) and if the two meet in the same enclosure, a baby animal is born. That's cute, and what's most important, influences the values of the animal tiles in an interesting way.

These extra features spice up the game. They're quite elegant, too, the game doesn't feel clunky. The money actions could use a memory aid on the player boards, but play a game or two and they aren't a problem anymore.

Overview

As a result, there's a game that's clever, simple, has some nice interaction between players but nothing too major and looks cute, too. Clear Spiel des Jahres material, and no wonder it was a finalist (and my bet for the big winner!). The game works with the full scale of 2-5 players, but the two-player game is slightly dull and the five-player game has bit of downtime, so I'd say it's best with three or four.

Three more rounds of two-player Phoenicia. Two were quite exciting: first one went to tiebreaker, second one I eventually won as Tommy continued to struggle with economical restraints. Storage is good thing to have. The third game was a slaughter; unfortunately I was in the receiving end.

It's fun, but the small number of cards makes the games feel a bit samey. The breadth of strategies seems somewhat limited. There seem to some key choices and some tactical wiggling, but nothing like the scope of choices in San Juan. I'm pretty sure multiplayer games will fix this somewhat, as the number of cards is bigger. As a two-player game, Phoenicia seems to be a nice filler if played fast.

I did have a good time, despite continuing graphics problems with the software. It's still a must-buy for me, I do enjoy the game that much.

I played a game of Phoenicia at JKLM Interactive. It's a neat idea: they're offering a online game until the game is published. I'm not sure they're going to have lots of players when the game is published and playing is £5 a year, but for now it's a nice way to test the game.

The client isn't the most fluid piece of software but works well enough. I did have some graphics issues with it, but that didn't stop me from playing. When my opponent told me I could see extra info about everything with a right-button click (I'm not sure that's mentioned in the instructions), it really started to make sense.

So, I played a two-player game. It was a surprisingly close match, I lost 33-32. Not bad for a first game, especially as I was pretty clueless in the beginning (I'd read the short rules and browsed through the actual rulebook). It started to make sense in the end, and I was actually able to enjoy it.

The card development system seems sound, the money works well (not a trace of the utter awkwardness of Zavandor) and the game was a breeze to play (it took us something like 15 minutes). Fun, and something I need to play more, definitely.

Before, Tom Lehmann simply didn't register on my radar. I'm too young or something for the TimJim Games and Fast Food Franchise to mean anything to me. However, now I take a look at my list of three most-anticipated games - Caylus Magna Carta, Race for the Galaxy and Phoenicia - and hey, two out of three are Lehmann's games.

I was completely unaware of Phoenicia until I read the designer preview at Boardgame News. After that, I was hooked. It sounds brilliant! I liked many bits of Das Zepter von Zavandor, but after playing once, I found the game lacking in many respects. Based on Lehmann's preview, he's went and fixed all the bits about Outpost (of which Zavandor is a rehash) I found lacking, excessive length and the clunky currency system being the two most important bits.

What comes to theme, I quite like Outpost's robot factories and whatnot, but very much prefer Phoenicia's ancient civilization theme (especially with the focus being somewhere else than military might) to Zavandor's bland high fantasy. I've browsed through the rules and expect to enjoy Phoenicia a lot. Must buy, it seems...

Just 4 Fun isn't the most popular game, despite being a Spiel des Jahres finalist. From description, it sounds terribly inane. The name is horrible to start with. Four-in-a-row, with cards determining where you can play - can it be any more drab? But guess what, it's a surprisingly good game anyway.

Nothing special, that's for sure, but I still had fun with it. It has lots of maths, you need to do lots of sums in your head and well, I found that surprisingly entertaining. You do have some choices, deciding what is the best way to use one's cards to succeed and prevent others from succeeding. It's quick, too.

Don't get me wrong - I'm selling my copy as soon as someone buys it. Still, it was a pleasant enough distraction. We played it twice in a row with Johanna, even though she didn't enjoy the counting much. This would be an excellent teaching tool for mathematics classes, you have to do lots of sums in your head while you play...

I think it's a bit bland for being a SdJ finalist - last year had lots of better titles to choose from - but when it comes to very simple family games, it's not a bad choice.

I got a review copy of Zooloretto, latest entry to the Coloretto family. It's out now in Finnish (with Swedish, Norwegian and Danish rules included). The box was bigger than I expected, a full Kosmos-size box. Cute panda!

The game isn't a ripoff, but something quite clever. In its heart lies the basic Coloretto system: you either add to the sets or take one. The aim is to collect lots of certain types of items and avoid others. Here you are filling your zoo with animals, and the extra animals are bad for you.

There are some twists, though. You can shuffle the animals around a bit using money, you can buy extra space or even the animals someone else has deemed unnecessary and stored away - you can get necessary critters, but at the same time you help your opponent.

I played with Johanna and the two-player game worked pretty well. Nothing spectacular, but I expect the multi-player game to be better. The game seems quite good, really, as a family game. There's some interaction between players, but nothing too nasty - though the game has a mean streak somewhere there.

Yesterday's board game club started with a game of Leonardo da Vinci. This one's published in Finnish by Lautapelit.fi. Bit of a strange decision, it being such a gamer's game, but I suppose Puerto Rico has sold well enough.

It's an optimization game, basically. Players use workers to gather resources and convert them into inventions. Inventions make money, and money is what counts. You also have to use money to get stuff, so tough decisions are inevitable, as resources are scarce. The way the workers are placed to gather prices underlines the similarity between an auction and an area majority game, as it's a bit of both, really.

In the end I found the game a bit bland. It looks bland, that's for sure. We weren't terribly effective and unless you know what to do, the end game is particularly tricky and unsatisfying. With better experience, I'm quite sure the game's a bit better. It seems balanced enough, and it has nice setup system, where players can start with wildly varying resources.

So, good, but not great, and definitely deserves some more play before any final judgement is passed.

Last week I got Princeps Machiavelli, the new game from Spanish Alesia Games. It seems fairly interesting: card game with a Machiavellian theme of conquest and combat. However, the inexperience of the publisher shows.

The game has quite bland graphics and the cards are about 80% flavor text. The worst bit is by far the rule book. At first I thought the game has had absolutely no blind playtesting, but apparently a bad translation is to blame. Anyway, the game is quite hard to learn from rules, and even rules discussion with the designer hasn't answered everything. There are things that simply aren't in the rules (or are wrong in the rules) and lack of examples makes things very hard to figure out.

So, for now I'm putting this one aside. If the publisher can come up with a thorough FAQ or rewritten rules, I'm willing to give this one another go, but as it is now, it's just way too much trouble for something that looks like it could be ok.

Since we couldn't play Princeps Machiavelli, we had to play something else. Taj Mahal caught my eye, and the guys agreed. This was my first time with just four players and I think the game works just fine with four. Three is probably not quite enough.

I was faithful for my traditions and placed second. I'm proud I could catch up with Robert's very scary lead - after the final scoring I was actually ahead of him, but the card bonuses changed that. Wonderful game, anyhow, I went and upped my rating to nine.