In Punto, you're trying to create a line of four or five of your cards, but you can't always place them where you want.
The game includes four decks of 18 cards each, with each deck having cards with 1-9 dots on it twice. You shuffle your cards to form a face-down deck. On a turn, place your top card somewhere in a 6x6 grid that players create during play. You can place in an empty space adjacent to cards already played, or you can place your card on top of another card as long as your card has more dots on it than the card being covered. As soon as you create a row of 4-5 cards in your color, you win the round. Remove the most dotty card in that row from the game, then everyone shuffles their decks and beings a new round. Whoever wins two rounds first wins the game!
In a two-player game, each player has two decks of cards shuffled together, but they must create a line of only a single color. In a three-player game, each player receives six cards of the unused color at random, and they play these cards as blockers.
- Classic family-friendly weight with enduring appeal
- Rare to find at such a low price for a Spiel des Jahres winner
- Out of print; difficult to locate
- animal placement and zoo management
- Zoo-building family game
- classic Spiel des Jahres-family weight
- Zoo
- Other classic family drafters
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Drafting — Draft trucks and place animals in a zoo layout.
- Tile Placement — Position animals to create a cohesive zoo.
- tile/board placement — Position animals to create a cohesive zoo.
- Zoo-building — Balance animal diversity and layout constraints.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This is $5 on the site.
- A great onboarding pro game to get people to understand new hobby games.
- It's a fantastic game that mixes card play and dice in Star Wars Destiny.