#zooloretto

Zooloretto: The Dice Game 

Have you ever wanted to play Zooloretto, but didn’t want to have fun? Then, my friend, this might just be the game for you... Full disclosure: I typically have pretty awful luck with dice and find games that rely too heavily on dice mechanics kind of annoying.

In Zooloretto: The Dice Game, you take a number of dice based on your number of players and on your turn you can either roll two dice and add them to trucks, or take a truck. When you take a truck, you tick off boxes on your Zoo sheet to indicate that you have added that animal to your exhibits. Filling an exhibit with a particular animal takes different numbers of tick marks and is worth different values of points. For example, your zoo only ever wants one alligator, but it wants five lions.

The problem is the dice. They’re all the same. They have one of each animal and one coin on the six faces of the die. So, it’s really easy (and happens a lot when I play this) to have tons and tons of alligators that nobody ever wants. Once you have your tick mark by the exhibit, an extra animal means you tick the box on your barn for that type of animal and lose points for having extra alligators or whatever.

I think this game is broken on a pretty fundamental level because of that. I think you either needed dice that had different numbers of the different animals (so, your park only needs one alligator, but there’s only one die with an alligator icon), or it needed to not restrict you on which animals you needed in large quantities (in this case, you could only have one animal type that had five animals, one with four, one with three, etc.; but, you got to choose which animal types those were). As it is, you could have a statistically improbable run of luck and roll nothing but alligators and ostriches, just making everyone miserable.