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SolidNight at the Zoo Review
7.2/ 10- Played 1 time on this shelf
- 1–4 players · best at 2
- 30 min
- Medium weight
I played this one with the Stones, a night spent trying to get every animal home safely while the zoo sat dark around us. The premise is simple enough to explain in one breath. The animals need to find their way back to their enclosures, and you're the one drafting tiles each round to build the paths that get them there. What isn't simple is how differently every single animal wants to be gotten home.
That's really where the game earns its keep. Every creature has its own way of moving and its own way of scoring, so a strategy that's working beautifully for one animal is completely useless for the next, and you end up relearning the board every round instead of settling into a groove. The penguin doesn't so much move as commit, sliding down a line once it's headed that way, and a bad penguin decision haunts you for a while. The snake curls around things in a way that made me reread my own board more than once, coming at a tile from a direction I hadn't planned for at all.
And then there's the sloth, which might be my favorite thing in the whole box. It moves exactly like you'd expect a sloth to move, which is to say barely, and there's something genuinely funny about watching everyone else's animals race for home while your sloth is still deciding whether tonight's the night. It's a small design choice that does a lot of work, because it turns what could've been a frustrating handicap into one of the best jokes at the table.
I still haven't gotten to the Latecomers expansion, so I can't speak to how it changes things, but the base game alone gave us a full night of genuine enjoyment and more than a few laughs at that sloth's expense. It's the kind of game where the theme and the mechanics actually needed each other to work, and that's rarer than it should be.
