This new board game from the designer of SETI is simple, stunning, and addictive

Designer Tomáš Holek burst onto the board games scene in 2024, and he’s made quite the first impression. While he’s best known for the stunning, award-winning strategy game SETI, his resume has many other bangers: Pondscape, Galileo Galilei, and more. Night at the Zoo, a simple tile placement game, is his latest title. I bought a copy at Gen Con, and I haven’t stopped playing it since.

Holek might be loved for his elegant strategy titles, and Night at the Zoo’s spatial puzzle certainly has elements of euro about it. You’ll play as a rather inept zoo keeper. The animals have escaped their enclosures, and you must return them under cover of night to avoid a wrathful boss.

Mechanically, you take turns drafting and placing tiles on your player board, then rinse and repeat until the unused tiles fill up the round tracker. There’s always one more tile than there are players in the draft pool, and each has its own terrain type and action. Placing a tile in your zoo creates a path for the animals around the border.

If you want those blighters to move, however, there’s a few extra steps. First, you’ll have to take the ‘discover’ action to sniff them out of hiding. Then, you’ll need to use the ‘move’ action to steer them back to the zoo at the center of your board.

These actions are taken whenever you place a tile with its symbol in your zoo, or if the space you’ve covered shows the action symbol you’re after. As well as move and discover, you also have a ‘draw’ action that nets you a neutral tile in the terrain type of your choice. Some spaces on your board also offer victory points or have specific tile conditions. That creates a rich decision space – impressive for such a simple gameplay loop.

That’s not all there is to it, though. If it was, we’d have those slowpoke sloths home in no time. Night at the Zoo throws a few more obstacles your way, mainly in the form of movement rules.

Typically, the move action allows one animal to advance one tile (if you’ve not got a path of tiles for them to move onto, bad luck). Each zoo starts with three of three different animals, though – and some of them really screw with the movement rules.

Penguins slide all the way to the end of a direct path. Snakes can only move in one direction, so they have to spend an entire movement changing direction. Sloths move one tile and then fall asleep, so they’ll waste their next move action waking up.

There’s also a ‘special move’ that adds complexity. On your turn, you can discard a tile to move every animal that’s on the same type of terrain. It takes some setting up, but it’s an effective way to get animals in enclosures before your time runs out.

Similarly, there’s an end-of-round movement rule that helps accelerate your plans. This is tied to Night at the Zoo’s unique way of tracking rounds. Once all the spaces for unused tiles have been filled, a round is over, and you calculate which terrain appears most often. All animals on that same terrain type now take a move action.

These many movement options are the heart of this delightfully addictive puzzle. Night at the Zoo has enough decision points to get your brain whirring, but not enough to slow down its breezy gameplay. It may not be a euro, but it taps into what makes that genre great. Namely: you’re never quite capable of doing everything. It adds tension to your choices, and it creates a delicious challenge of efficiency.

Despite this, Night at the Zoo is not without problems. Theme is one sticking point.

Visually, it’s realized beautifully, with adorable animal art and meeples to coo over. Mechanically, there’s a mismatch. If our zoo keepers are herding animals to avoid corporate punishment, why is there no penalty for leaving animals unfound? You score points for each animal rescued (which varies between species), and there’s a bonus point for each animal discovered, but abandoning animals has no consequence.

The game’s other scoring element also makes things feel a little too solved. Certain tiles have food symbols rather than action ones, and these are worth points for how many different ones you’ve collected. It’s not impossible to win a game if you ignore food symbols, but I’m yet to see a game won by someone who didn’t prioritize them.

This, combined with limited setup variation and only six animal types, reduces replayability. I can see euro veterans cracking the puzzle early and growing bored from a lack of diversity. There are already multiple expansions that solve these problems, but I’ll always think less of a board game that needs expansions to solve its problems.

That being said, many of my favorite games commit the same sins. Wingspan is noticeably better with the Oceania expansion. I wasn’t a fan of Viticulture on its own, but the Bordeaux expansion fixes all my pet peeves. And Root just keeps getting more replayable with every new faction. All have a place in our best board games guide, even if they weren’t perfect on the first try.

So I’ll forgive Night at the Zoo for being a little sparse on content. It’s an easygoing puzzle game I haven’t tired of yet. It might not appeal to everyone, but personally? I’m hungry for more. Those expansions might already be on my shopping list…

Want to learn more about this year’s top releases? Check out our full best board games guide, or hit me up for recommendations in the Wargamer Discord.

Source: Wargamer