A modern, cooperative take on the classic zoo escape premise.
EMERGENCY! A computer malfunction at the Bedlam Zoo has short-circuited the gates for all the enclosures and the animals are escaping and making their way to the zoo exit. You will work together with your fellow zookeepers to round up all the animals and lock their enclosures before it's too late.
Zoo Break is a crisis-management game that requires dynamic and cooperative problem-solving. You will spend your turn deciding how to use limited actions to move about the board, collect and trade supplies, capture animals, and lock cages, all while evading injury and coping with other challenges caused by the animals marauding through the zoo. Escape and Move cards control the animals with maximum variability, leading to endlessly different game scenarios.
Success hinges on the keepers' ability to anticipate, adapt, and make strategic decisions, applying their skills and resources to regain control of the zoo. It's complex and suspenseful enough to keep adults riveted, but also playful and inviting to ambitious, game-loving kids. (Difficulty can also be regulated using a simple card selection mechanism at the start of the game.)
—description from the publisher
- Silly and cartoonish
- Charming
- Good cooperative game
- Win as a family
- animals escaping and being rounded up
- a zoo
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Cooperative — it's also a good cooperative game... we can work together and win as a family.
- Set Collection — Let's go round them up and bring them back.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Here are my 10 favorite.
- The theme disappears pretty quickly. It's more about a puzzly type game than it is about the theme.
- This is the kind of game that you would accidentally buy at a museum gift shop and be like, 'It's probably not that good.' and you go, 'Wait a minute, it really is.'
- This is where you're building like a sanctuary. This is with these really endangered animals and I think that's kind of the draw to this game.
- The silliest game on my list, but I like it a lot.
- This is one where you're going, oh, this is actually a one that we can work together and win as a family.
- Ark Nova is a fantastic game, one of my favorite games I've ever played.
- it's the animals and the theming of it that put it over the top for me because I like having a Bengal tiger in my zoo and some spider monkeys and whatever else might be in there. I love that concept.