#cryptid cafe

Zoo Vadis was a game I found off kickstarter that is actually a remake of the game Quo Vadis?: where players in a roman senate advance their senator tokens and make deals along the way. From the changes I’ve seen Zoo Vadis makes some good tweaks!

In Zoo Vadis each player picks an animal in the zoo. You have 6 tokens of that animal. The board has four starting enclosures at the bottom and through branching paths and enclosures of varying sizes ends with the star enclosure at the top. On your turn you place one of your animal tokens on the bottom, advance one to the next enclosure, advance a peacock, or move the zookeeper.

The trick of the game is you need to accrue more laurels, victory points, than the other players AND you need to get one token in the star exhibit. If you aren’t in the star exhibit you get 0 points.

To advance your animal token you need the majority vote of the enclosure you’re in. An enclosure with 3 spaces needs 2 votes, 5 spaces needs 3 votes, and so forth. You require minimum those votes, so if you’re the only animal in a 5 space enclosure you aren’t going anywhere. You can use your victory point laurels to bribe the neutral peacock faction OR make deals with other players.

And thats the heart of Zoo Vadis. This is a highly social negotiation game. If you play solitaire and secure your own path to zip to the end you will end the game with barely any points. Voting for another animal awards you a 1pt Laurel as the winning player claims a laurel token between 2-5pts. You need to spend time advancing your tokens and helping others advance, aka extorting your friends. All deals made within the turn must be abided by but not if the deal extends beyond that turn. “If you pay me 2 laurels I’ll vote for you this turn” must be abided by. “You vote for me this turn I’ll vote for you next turn” can be broken as a deal. But if you aren’t trustworthy, who will make deals with you?

And thats what I love about Zoo Vadis. There’s a balance here: shoot right to the end and you barely score any points. Spend too much time racking up laurels the other players can and will block you from the star exhibit.

The zookeeper token allows you to advance without a vote, but you don’t acquire the normal laurel token for advancing. The peacocks also add a lot of strategic depth, using them to block paths or gum up enclosures for rough votes. Our 4 player game had 5 spaces in the star enclosure and 2 spaces were taken up by peacocks so one player ended with 0 points since we all couldn’t make it.

The production design is also stellar. I love the art direction, each faction is a different kind of fancy. The art looks great, the pieces are high quality, its amazing.

There are optional powers but every review I’ve seen says the powers cause unnecessary clutter so we opted not to use them.

This is where I bring in the asterisk*. If your friends enjoy more solitaire style games like Earth where we largely work on our own engines then compare scores at the end you won’t have a good time. Everyone needs to be social and be aggressive, you get the most points if you make the most deals. If your friends enjoy lots of gotcha! mechanics or interaction heavy games this is a top tier one for the group. Just light enough on mechanics to keep the game from bogging down with 3-7 people making it a great game for large groups.

Cryptid Cafe! I bought this game just bc of the flavoring and art and I don’t regret it! In Cryptid Cafe you have cryptids coming to your cafe! They have an order at the top you’re looking to fulfill! Send your three server tokens to the chef up top to get ingredients like Brain-Lettuce-Tomato sandwiches or Hot Apple Spider, Cinnemonster Rolls. Serve them before your cryptid guests get mad and walk out on you. Play 8 rounds and the highest score wins!

This is a game I bought bc it looked cute and I’m glad its mechanics had some meat on them bones. You have 3 worker tokens (your servers). The kraken chef’s board has all 3 ingredients with 3, 2, 1, 1 spaces beneath each. Place your worker on a chosen spot to gain that many of that food. At the end of worker placement players can tip the chef. If you’re last in line you can pay one money (victory point) per space to go higher, get more ingredients while bumping everyone down. Its a fairly cutthroat mechanic, one tip from my roommate at the last round stopped her brother from being able to fulfill his last order. Its also a great worker placement mechanic, since you can place anywhere 3-1, you can intentionally place last to tip, and just bc you snagged the first spot doesn’t mean you’re safe.

At its heart its an efficiency game. Guests request 2-4 foods and you can only gather with three workers per turn. Figure out how to use your gathers efficiently and serve your guests. Its theming is an absolute delight and its puzzle of getting the right food was just meaty enough for us to enjoy. Its not the deepest game but for what its doing its good.

I will mention, if this is a dealbreaker for you, that the developers aren’t aware of the taboo nature of the wendigo and that is included here.