Fourpenny Zoo
Build a zoo, fill it with animals from around the world, and attract guests. Use your deckbuilding skills to balance the needs of your guests and animals with the goals of 15 unique scenarios.
Platforms
The game plays best on PCs/laptops and tablets, with either a mouse or touchscreen. Smaller screens, tall, or very wide screens might have issues.
Instructions
Each scenario has a main goal, and a bonus goal to go for. You have a number of months to complete those objectives. You can play the scenarios in any order, but the scenarios increase in both complexity and difficulty. Your high scores for scenarios are stored in your browser local storage.
In a scenario, each month you draw a hand of 5 cards. You may play one card for its main action. The other cards in your hand then generate various resources based on their icons in the top left. The card you play will not gain these resources, so choose your action carefully.
Then, spend the resources you gained to improve your zoo:
- Open the blueprint screen and spend your research (
) to investigate animals from various regions around the world. Selecting one of these animals reserves it so that you can make the investment to bring it into your zoo. You can hold a reserve on these animals indefinitely, but costs will increase if you already have 5. - On the blueprint screen, you can also spend cash (
) to acquire other cards from the market directly to your discard pile by paying their printed costs (top right corner). - With animals reserved, you can spend cash to fully acquire the animals from the research zone, paying for transportation and enclosures to put the card on top of your deck. Animals in the research zone won't do anything for you until you do. Some special animals also require spending conservation (
) to acquire into your zoo.
At the end of the month, any remaining cash is discarded - use it or lose it. For each two unused research (), you will gain one conservation token (). Many animals are crowd-pleasers, which generate tickets (
). At the end of the month, you can attract one guest card based on the number of tickets you generated that month. More tickets will attract a higher-tier guest card, which can generate more money and add more to your total guest count.
After that you draw a new hand of cards (shuffling your discard pile into your deck when empty) and start the next month.
Tips
If you don't pay attention to your higher tier guests (play them for their action), they will generate unhappiness (
) with their default resources. If the zoo happiness level gets too low, it will be harder to attract guests. Keep an eye out for cards that generate happiness (
) to counteract this as your zoo grows.
Controls
The game is primarily mouse driven, but there are some keyboard shortcuts.
- Space - Open / close blueprints
- Escape - close popup
- Enter - Pass / end month
Right click / long press - In most places, this shows details about the card, and some extra rule clarifications.
Touch screen notes: Tap the scenario name to see your progress, and the date to see how many month remain. Additional options are hidden under the gear icon.
Version Notes
Dec 4 2024 - initial release
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
This is a really nicely balanced deckbuilder game! It does a good job of creating a lot of diversity and making every card seem useful.
A couple notes:
While the "score a card" mechanic is useful, the naming seems a little misleading. The main purpose of it seems to be having cards count as being within the zoo for victory objective purposes without them cluttering the deck. But because "score a card" is based on fairly uncommon animal activations, I spent a bit of time thinking it meant activating a card and was left wondering why my balloon stands weren't helping.
Guest cards are easy to come by and there are other sources of money so the unhappiness mechanic doesn't really have much teeth. A lot of the time I found myself eager to reduce the number of guests in my deck.
Thank you for the feedback!