If you want a walk through of the game play, obsessed board gamers has done a decent video review; take a look.
The mechanics I liked in this game:
- The building up and selecting of animal "trucks". - basically for each player there is a truck that holds up to 3 cards, you go around in a circle and place animals on the trucks, anyone can choose to take a truck at any point. Tile selection is one of the few random events that I really like in board games. In this case you've got the interplay between loading a truck that you wan't vs not making it too inticing for other players. Since you can't place a tile on a truck and take it in the same turn, there is a lot of posturing. It worked well.
- Animal placement, and expansion of the board. Since animal's can't be directly adjacent, there are decisions to make about where you place animals, but more importantly, how much space you need to expand your collection of animals. Time is involved to make sure you expand the board where you need space for animals. I ended up expanding in the wrong direction one game, and this resulted in a glut of animals that I simply didn't have space for, but should have. This added a bit of a puzzle aspect to the game, I liked.
i think i might like the "stand pat" mechanic, where you can't take any actions after taking your truck.
ReplyDeletealso, the light puzzling sounds like what I hoped would be going on on the farm board in agricola, but wasn't.
Yeah, the not taking actions after you take a truck is good. In the games we played, everyone would save their money actions as a means of stalling the act of filling up the truck. Thus, the responsibility fell to others and you could hopefully capitalize on them filling the trucks for you.
ReplyDeleteI played Zooloretto yesterday and thought I would compare the differences between the two. Zooloretto is the second game in the "retto" series (Coloretto is the first and not very similar) and a Spiel des Jahres winner from 2007, Aquaretto is the thid in the series and has made some interesting changes.
ReplyDeleteIn both games the general concept of the game is the same. Collect similar animals for your zoo and avoid types you do not feature. On your turn you do one of the following:
1) Place an animal, money icon, or if playing Zoo' a vending cart tile on a truck
2) Take a money action to move animals around, expand your zoo, buy animals from another player, or release animals.
3) Deliver a truck to your zoo and sit out for the rest of the round.
The major differences are found in the arrangement of the zoo board space. In Aqua' the board is open and you can place animals anywhere as long as they are adjacent to other animals of the same type. In Zoo' you have defined size pens that when filled provide points and in some cases money bonuses. Only one animal type is allowed per pen and thus similar to Aqua you can only have three animal types before your addition.
In Zoo' you have a barn which holds all your overflow tiles and you can swap all animals of one type with all animals of another type from pen to pen or from pen to barn. This means that sometimes having multiple animals of a single type in your barn is not a problem because you can put them in a pen later in the game for a relatively low price. In Aqua' you have a holding tank and you can only move or buy animals on top of the stack.
Vending tiles in Zoo' provide a flat two points per type you control at game end and partial points for pens that are not full.
Ultimately if you really enjoy one game I would recommend the other as they use similar solid mechanics that Andy talked about but vary enough to keep them interesting. An even better plan would be to convince your friend to buy the complementary game...