Very fun game, likely spent too much time playing it.
One quick note: I think it's a bit too easy to go infinite. With radiant refuge, I can pretty consistently do it on the fourth month, but I have got it turn 3. By searching in south America, it's reasonably easy to find the cards you need:
2 birds, for resources without taking actions (penguin, macaw)
multiples of either tamarin, each of which draws extra cards without costing actions. Eventually you can draw you deck and just loop with monkeys.
llama, which gives 2 actions
black legged poison dart frog, which allows you to pull all other cards from your deck
Spectacled bear, which gives you more ecology
With 2 birds and 2 tamarins, you have infinite money, happiness and science. With Llama and bear, you also have actions and ecology. Using that you can fish in Africa for gorilla, which gives you infinite guests (while scoring them so as to not overload your deck), bypassing tickets entirely. One of the Camels from Eurasia lets you refresh the shop until you find whatever other staff/facilities you want. In this way, you can complete any objectives instantly. Frog and social media team stripes everything else to keep you functional. Beaver lets you draw your deck every turn, donkey keeps you form having to reset them every two turns.
Because all the core cards for the loop are in South America, you can fish in that one zone with your first 6-8 science and usually get enough to start the loop. Once you have it going, resources become irrelevant. Eurasia and Australia have other birds that can complete the loop (and Australia has a llama alternative), but if you split up the card draw cards and gave them to an animal in Africa or North America, I think it would be much harder to pull off the loop.
That's a good point - thanks for the feedback! Going infinite really wasn't intended, and that does seem way too easy particularly in the earlier scenarios. I thought I had a cheeky little block for this that prevented you from shuffling your discard back into your deck twice during a turn, but apparently I never implemented it.
I just updated the game so that cards you play for an action only go into the discard pile once you're out of actions. I weighed some other options, but this seems like the cleanest. You can still engineer your deck to have some explosive turns, but I think the decisions to do that are more interesting.
Very nice deck-builder with high replay value. I especially like that very different strategies are possible, depending on the cards offered in the market and personal preferences.
The card details view via Right click / long press is very useful. For example, "Score a card" is (now?) clearly explained there, and for the hand cards, the info at the bottom is only visible in the details view (unless you have only a small vertical window size)
What I am missing: Neither the Park Value, nor the Conservation Score seem to be explained; for the latter I think now it is the sum of conversation tokens gained and on cars in the zoo.
What I am really missing: A way to view the content of the three card stacks, or at least for the whole active deck (draw and discard).
Thank you, and while the game is already good to play as is: Have fun developing this game further!
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.
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Very fun game, likely spent too much time playing it.
One quick note: I think it's a bit too easy to go infinite. With radiant refuge, I can pretty consistently do it on the fourth month, but I have got it turn 3. By searching in south America, it's reasonably easy to find the cards you need:
2 birds, for resources without taking actions (penguin, macaw)
multiples of either tamarin, each of which draws extra cards without costing actions. Eventually you can draw you deck and just loop with monkeys.
llama, which gives 2 actions
black legged poison dart frog, which allows you to pull all other cards from your deck
Spectacled bear, which gives you more ecology
With 2 birds and 2 tamarins, you have infinite money, happiness and science. With Llama and bear, you also have actions and ecology. Using that you can fish in Africa for gorilla, which gives you infinite guests (while scoring them so as to not overload your deck), bypassing tickets entirely. One of the Camels from Eurasia lets you refresh the shop until you find whatever other staff/facilities you want. In this way, you can complete any objectives instantly. Frog and social media team stripes everything else to keep you functional. Beaver lets you draw your deck every turn, donkey keeps you form having to reset them every two turns.
Because all the core cards for the loop are in South America, you can fish in that one zone with your first 6-8 science and usually get enough to start the loop. Once you have it going, resources become irrelevant. Eurasia and Australia have other birds that can complete the loop (and Australia has a llama alternative), but if you split up the card draw cards and gave them to an animal in Africa or North America, I think it would be much harder to pull off the loop.
That's a good point - thanks for the feedback! Going infinite really wasn't intended, and that does seem way too easy particularly in the earlier scenarios. I thought I had a cheeky little block for this that prevented you from shuffling your discard back into your deck twice during a turn, but apparently I never implemented it.
I just updated the game so that cards you play for an action only go into the discard pile once you're out of actions. I weighed some other options, but this seems like the cleanest. You can still engineer your deck to have some explosive turns, but I think the decisions to do that are more interesting.
Very nice deck-builder with high replay value. I especially like that very different strategies are possible, depending on the cards offered in the market and personal preferences.
The card details view via Right click / long press is very useful. For example, "Score a card" is (now?) clearly explained there, and for the hand cards, the info at the bottom is only visible in the details view (unless you have only a small vertical window size)
What I am missing: Neither the Park Value, nor the Conservation Score seem to be explained; for the latter I think now it is the sum of conversation tokens gained and on cars in the zoo.
What I am really missing: A way to view the content of the three card stacks, or at least for the whole active deck (draw and discard).
Thank you, and while the game is already good to play as is: Have fun developing this game further!
c ya
Paw de Gribeau
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!