Who Can Resist Building Parks
Just the other day we saw a movie trailer for Wonder Park, where a little girl spends her days imagining herself building the amusement park of her dreams filled with talking animals. It’s no surprise that constructing your own park is a dream of many children. Even grownups would love to fill a land with all their favourite things. We recently played two games surrounding this theme. In Tiny Park (from Haba) we construct an amusement park, while in Wonder Zoo (from Djeco) we construct our own Zoo.
Tiny Park
Designer: Marco Teubner // Publisher: HABA // Ages: 5+
Gameplay: Tile Laying with Yahtzee-style dice rolling
Tiny Park is a small box game from our favourite publisher of kids games, Haba. In Tiny Parks, you have a grid board where you will be placing various rides and restaurants of various polyomino shapes. In order to place a tile, you roll dice in a Yahtzee fashion. You have three opportunities to roll the amount of symbols on a tile in order to claim it and place it on your board. The first to fill up their board wins.
Thoughts On Gameplay: Light and quick with an engaging theme
The Yahtzee mechanic is a popular one used in many games including our previous posts on Outfoxed and King of Tokyo. The reason it works so well for kids is because it allows luck mitigation, giving players extra attempts to overcome unlucky roles. It also provides a level of strategic decision making in which dice to keep before re-rolling. You don’t want to end your turn empty handed, so do you keep that one symbol to get the smallest tile? Or push your luck to get the largest tile, allowing you to fill up more space and possibly complete your board sooner.
The rules and gameplay are incredibly simple, making it more targeted to younger ages. Our 4 year old absolutely loved the game and requested to play again immediately. And then again after that. Our 7 year old enjoyed the theme, and don’t mind playing it again with her younger sister, she felt it was a little too simple for her and wanted to play a game with some more depth. However, for both of them the theme was fantastic. They enjoyed talking about the types of rides they were getting to place and being able to get a pizza restaurant because it’s their favourite. At the end when the park is all set they then discuss the variety of rides in their park and why people would love their Tiny Park.
Overall Impressions: Engaging for young ages
Overall, the game is engaging mostly by its theme. It works perfectly for that young 4-5 age range and the Yahtzee mechanic keeps it just entertaining enough to keep older kids and parents interested.
WonderZoo
Designer: Florian Fay // Publisher: Djeco // Ages: 7+
Gameplay: Tile-drafting and laying
In WonderZoo you are again using a personal grid board and filling it with polyomino tiles. However, here you are taking turns drawing a number of tiles of of a bag and selecting one (also known as drafting). You can take one tiles and place it on your board. If you take an animal exhibit tile you can place it anywhere it fits. If you take a pathway tile it must touch another pathway tile connected to the main entrance of your park. In addition, the tile you take will have a symbol indicating an optional action you can take. Most are adding visitors (little meeples) to your park. You place them on the pathway to view the animal exhibits. Other symbols indicate moving visitors, moving animal exhibit tiles, or taking the bus token which allows you first choice at the tiles next round. You do so until your board is filled (or if you can’t fill in any of the remaining gaps). You score points for each animal exhibit each visitor is adjacent to.
Thoughts on Gameplay: Simple turns with strategic spatial decisions
Djeco doesn’t get enough recognition as a game publisher, but they have a number of great titles under their belts. They are a French publisher so their distribution isn’t as wide, but it is continuing to grow as most of their games are language independent with multilingual rule books. WonderZoo was an absolute hit in our house.
Again, the theme of building a park is amazing. The kids love picking which animals to add and collecting the little meeples to visit their park gives a tactile satisfaction and feeds their imagination as they really become engaged with what they are building. My kids talk to the animals and narrate the visitors as they view the animals, really turning it into a game and toy at the same time.
The decision making is simple with plenty of options and zero disappointing turns. No tile is a bad tile so you are always getting something good on your turn. However the decisions of which additional action is best for you really directs the strategy in the game. Do you need more visitors (since they are what get you points)? Do you want first pick next turn? Towards the end, the ability to move your visitors to maximize points is critical. Placement of your tiles, although feel inconsequential at the beginning, quickly become critical so you can possibly have one visitor in view of 2-3 animal exhibits. (Sidenote: The opposite side of the boards have some obstacles which you can not cover, increasing some difficulty to the game).
Overall Impressions: Engaging theme and strategy for all ages
As an adult I was engaged in the game and decisions. Our 7 year old loved the decisions she could make to make sure all her visitors were viewing all the animal exhibits. And our 4 year old, who wasn’t concerned about strategy, just thoroughly enjoyed building the park and moving around the little meeple visitors. It was great to see a game engage various ages. WonderZoo was wonderful.
Bonus For the Big Meeples :: Barenpark
Designer: Phil Walker-Harding // Publisher: Lookout Games // Ages: 8+
Polyomino tile placement has been a huge gaming mechanic in the past couple of years. There is just something incredibly satisfying by placing Tetris-like tiles and having them fit snuggly within each other. BarenPark is just one of those games, but also follows along the theme of building a park that features both animals (mostly bears) and amusement rides.
Gameplay
In Barenpark you again have a grid board that you fill with tiles. However, you can add more boards to expand your park (up to 4 boards total). You begin with a tile and you place it on your board. As you cover up symbols on your board it allows you to collect more tiles from the common pool of tiles. The majority of tiles have points listed on them (which you add up at the end to see who wins). Certain symbols allow you to collect tiles of higher value and larger sizes (making them harder to fit into your board). When ever you fill a board (any of the 4 you will eventually collect) you gain a single square tile that is worth a lot of points, but the value of those tiles in supply will decrease as more people are gaining them. First person to fill all 4 boards triggers game end and you tally up your points.
Impressions of Gameplay
A very similar game to WonderZoo and Tiny Park, where you are filling up your park with polynomial tiles. The way you gain tiles are simple as you decide which symbols you want to cover up in order to gain certain tiles. The game feels more like a race as most tiles are either low in supply, or decrease in value as more people take them. There is more of a puzzly feel to the game as there are some obstacles to build around and once a tile is down you can not move them, making some forward planning critical. Other than racing to get a certain tile before someone else does, the game plays fairly solitaire, which isn’t something I look for when playing with adults. The strategy is light and mostly consists of making the best decision on your turn with which tiles are available.
Overall Impressions
Compared to WonderZoo, Barenpark steps up the strategy ever so slightly, by adding a few more interesting placement decisions and including the tense feeling of a race to get those high-valued tiles. I was hoping for a little more strategic depth, and was surprised how Wonder Zoo, a game directed at a younger audience, wasn’t too far behind in complexity but with a much shorter duration of play. However, Barenpark is a solid family game and we recommend it for a family game night with kids 8 and older, but also works well as a light game for adults to gather around.
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Tiny Parks was generously provided by Haba, as was WonderZoo by Ilo307.