2007.12.11
Thebes and Zooloretto: First Impressions
On Sunday, Jason and I tried both Thebes and Zooloretto for the first time. It was just the two of us, so we played the two-player rules for both games, which differ a little bit from the rules for more than two players.
I enjoyed both games, and they were both quite different from games I have played previously.
We tried Thebes first, and I was a bit surprised to discover the length of the rules. While longer than I would have expected, the rules were quite easy to follow, and once we figured the game out, it turned out to be very easy to play. The main tension in the game comes from deciding what to do on your turn. As an interesting alternative to action-point based games like Tikal, In Thebes you can only do one action on your turn, but some actions take longer to complete than others, and thus cause your time marker to advance further. Each player has their own time marker, so the total amount of time you can spend in the game is a fixed resource. You might take a single turn that lasts for 10 weeks in the game, while another player may opt to do 3 shorter turns instead that total up to 10 weeks of cost. The player furthest “back in time” takes the next turn, so it is also possible to end up with consecutive turns if you are taking short turns and other players are taking long ones.
It’s quite clever, and forces you to make some tough decisions. Any time you have to travel there is a cost in weeks, and actions that provide you more gain have a greater cost than actions that produce less gain.
Possibly the most interesting mechanic in the game comes when you decide to excavate on your turn. The longer you choose to run the excavation, the more tokens you get to draw from the bag for your location. However, at the start of the game, 50% of the tokens in the bag are completely worthless, so even if you draw 6 or 7 tokens, you may only get a couple of useful ones (or none at all). Even worse, after keeping any tokens of value, the worthless ones go back in the bag, which means that future excavations are even less likely to produce useful results.
It’s quite a lot of fun to draw the tokens out of the bag one at a time, and it really adds to the feel of the game.
Next up was Zooloretto, which was this year’s winner of the Spiel des Jahres, for good reason. It’s an excellent family game. It espouses all of the values that Eurogamers hold dear. And best of all, it’s neither about resource trading in the Mediterranean Sea, nor does it involve pushing wooden blocks around to achieve majorities in different areas.
In Zooloretto, you get to put animals and vending stalls into your zoo. All of the animals and stalls are delivered by truck, and players cooperatively fill up the trucks. Each round, each player takes one truck back to their zoo, and then they are out for the rest of the round. There is a lot of tension in deciding which truck to take – do you take a truck early, before it’s completely full, to make sure you get what you want? Or do you push your luck? Do you take the truck that gives you the animals you want, or the one that gives you additional cash immediately? And what the heck are you going to do with those animals that you don’t want?
It’s a really fun game with surprising strategic options if you look for them. It’s also simple enough that you can pick it up and start playing very quickly, without a lot of teaching.
In the end, I lost both games, but only by very slim margins. I lost Thebes by a single point, and I lost Zooloretto by only two points. One might argue that I lost Thebes by luck more than skill, but in the end, I did feel that Jason managed his time better than I did, so perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I almost won by luck more than skill. As for Zooloretto, well, I got greedy and it bit me in the end. My zoo was bursting at the seams, and the extra animals cost me a bit too much.
I highly recommend both games if you’re looking for a new Eurogame to try out this holiday season. Zooloretto would get the nod for family gaming over Thebes because it scales to 5 players and would be a bit better for younger gamers, while Thebes might satisfy someone seeking a bit more depth.
Subscriptions