(All for nothing)
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Publisher's Description:Each player tries to collect as many different animals as possible, for they will bring positive points. But they beware of the black cats, for they bring negative points. The player with the most animals wins. |
Box info:
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Trev says:There are two peculiar things about this game. Firstly, the description on the back of the box seems to have been written either before the game was completed or by someone who had never played - or else my translation skills are too poor for words (in any language). Secondly, although it is a straightforward card game, easily playable by children, I don't know of any five-year-olds who would understand the strategy involved in playing. Perhaps it was originally designed to be just as described on the box - which five-year-olds should be ok with. The game consists of eight different kinds of animal cards (including cats), each with values from 1 to 7, and a number of zoo-keeper cards, which are kept separate. According to the actual rules of the game, each player is dealt six or seven cards and the rest are laid out face-down in a rectangular grid. At the end of the hand a player will score the positive value of the highest card they hold of each animal type, except cats (who do not belong in the zoo), and the negative value of every other card. During play a player can pick up any face-down card from the grid, examine it, and replace it with a different card from their hand face-up. The requirements are that, to place a card face up, there must be no other face-up card of that animal type in the same row or column. If you have no card that will fit into the space, you place a zoo-keeper instead, leaving you with one extra card in your hand (which must be negative because there are only seven positive animal types and you begin with seven cards usually). If you are able to replace a zoo-keeper in the grid with a valid animal card, you can do so, reducing the number of cards you hold (you do not keep the zoo-keeper...). And if there is no legal card that can be placed in the space, you can place any card and place a zoo-keeper on top to indicate this. If you place a 1 card in the grid, you miss your next turn, but if you place a 7, you get an extra turn. It obviously gets a lot harder to place cards as the grid becomes full of more an more face-up cards, and you have to recognise when you need to get rid of cards that you are not going to be able to ditch for much longer. You can also play to engineer the situation where you are left with an impossible-to-use space, so allowing you to get rid of that card that wouldn't fit anywhere. Although you are still at the mercy of the draw in terms of the card you pick up, it is this careful selection of where to pick that card up from that would be beyond most five-year-olds of my acquaintance. Anyway, on the whole it is a good little filler for that spare 10 or 15 minutes at the end of an evening and is a good game to play with children too - only perhaps a little older than five. To buy: |
