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 cards 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.
High Scores
At the end of each scenario, your park (all the cards in your deck / discard / play / scoring zone) will be scored in two ways:
- Park Value: Based on the total $ value of all cards (cost to build in the top right of the card)
- Conservation Score: 1 point for each animal, and 1 for each in the card's build cost
Your high scores for the scenarios are tracked on the main menu if you completed the main objective.
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 months remain. Additional options are hidden under the gear icon.
Version Notes
- Dec 4 2024 - initial release
- Dec 15 2024 - Give the ongoing score trigger cards an alternative use
- April 19 2025 - Block infinite loops, add two animals to North America
Comments
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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!