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Zooloreto
And so with an hour to spare, it’s Zooloreto. Now, this game comes with a pedigree - no less than the 2007 Spiel des Jahres winner. The theme is zoo building and, as you might imagine, it is not a complicated game. In your turn you usually take a tile (mostly one of up to eight different types of animal, but possibly money or a vending stall) and place it on to one of the delivery trucks. Each truck has space for up to three tiles. If you wish, instead of placing a tile, you can take a truck and, because some tiles are a nuisance, there is a nice balance between taking an attractive partly-filled truck or waiting for a full one that potentially has some junk on it. You then place your animals into enclosures, one type of animal only per enclosure, and, because you only have a basic three enclosures, any spare animals are put in the barn – where they count as negative victory points at the end of the game. You get bonus money for filling enclosures, you can spend money to do various actions and breeding males and females can make the occasional baby. And that’s pretty much it.
And it goes down a storm. Dave, Ian and Roger take most games seriously, but this one seems to find a relaxed end-of-evening niche. Much whooping takes place, much mocking. Owners of gay flamingoes are held responsible for their animals, much bickering about which animals people should buy from each other, all in all a very pleasant hour’s gaming. Phil almost wins this one as well, not quite realising that he is leading going into the last turn and tries to do a bit too much. Simon smugly takes it instead.
And how was the holiday? Very nice, thank you, and considerably sunnier and drier than huge tracts of central England. Zooloreto made it’s debut – “nice” - but wasn’t quite the runaway success that had been hoped. Ticket to Ride went down well on its debut, but that old stand-by Alhambra proved to be the pick of the crop yet again. Good stuff.
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