zoo tycoon has been a mainstay of management gaming for over two decades, and honestly I’m shocked and appalled that it’s taken this long for anyone to get allowed to make a board game about it.
There’s too much customization with monsters and plastic miniatures holding swords, and far too little for games where you can only build cute things for cute animals. So it’s great to see Treecer getting a chance to do just that in an officially licensed release.
Currently on Kickstarter—where it has already doubled its requested target—zoo tycoon is a game for 2-4 players where everyone tries to “find the perfect balance between popularity and preservation”. This means that as the operator of the zoo, you have to build attractions that get people through the gates, but at the same time make sure you do enough work on things like breeding programs and buying/selling animals at the market.
There’s also a lot of strategy involved in your design work:
All of the main types (represented by the 22 different animal meeples) have different characteristics such as: B. number of animals per enclosure tile, behavior of males, biome, tolerance to other species, etc. Also, it is also important to always keep in mind the happiness level of each species, which is made up of the following needs: (1) experience, (2 ) free space, (3) number of retreat options and (4) group size.
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Despite the cool premise, this is actually a competitive game where players find the best compromise between the two key pillars and end up being the winners. The goal is to “build the most famous zoo in the city,” and I think it’s very funny to think of a city that has that four zoos in it. That’s too many zoos!
Oh and I hope you like meeples because zoo tycoon ships with over 200 of them represent 34 different speciesand the fancier edition of the game has these colored and laser etched, after which they look fantastic.
You can see more pictures and videos of the game on his Kickstarter page.
