Zooloretto on the iPhone and iPod Touch

Zooloretto Title Screen

One word… Finally!

Finally the iPhone receives a board game implementation of a fine Euro game.  It has been a long wait, but hopefully this will get the ball rolling.  The Apple App Store has a number of board games available, but 99% of them are the classic American crap that most American’s think comprise the entire board game genre… Monopoly (crap), Scrabble (crap), Checkers (crap), Chess (crap), every flavor of Rush Hour you can think of (okay, but not a board game), Trivial Pursuit (crap), Uno (crap), Yahtzee (crap)… okay you get the point.  It’s really sad that most Americans think of these as their only board game options, when there are literally thousands of excellent games that are virtually unknown in this country.

Zooloretto appears to be the first true Euro game available on the iPhone… at least as far as I can find.  “But Steve, what’s a Euro game?”, you ask?  Euro games (or Designer Games) are games typically imported from Europe, Germany in particular.  There is a growing contingent of American companies importing and/or publishing designer games here as well.  Euro games typically involve strategic gameplay that is often tightly wrapped around a specific theme.  The common person would call them “more difficult” or “hard games” compared to the standard Toys R Us staples.

Typically they do require a little investment learning the rules, which are necessarily a little more complicated than Monopoly.  But the payoff is tremendous.  Here is a list of some of the most common Euro games.  If you’ve never heard of them, you should look them up and learn about them.  These are the best of the best.

• Agricola
• Carcassonne
• Puerto Rico
• Power Grid
• Race for the Galaxy
• The Settlers of Catan

But anyway, back to one of my favorite Euro games, Zooloretto.  The developers did an amazing job of porting Zooloretto from a board game to the iPhone.  I’m not going to post a review of the game, but I don’t feel like it.  Rather, I’m just going to point out the things I love and the things I hate.

iPhone Zooloretto

What I love about Zooloretto on the iPhone:

• The Graphics
• The Gameplay
• Dragging and Dropping
• The Board Overview Screen

What I hate about Zooloretto on the iPhone:

• The constant animal sounds
• The fact that I can’t turn off the animal sounds without also turning off the game sounds
• The lack of a post-game overview of all players’ boards.  If someone else wins, I want to know why.

I’ve also found a rules problem that needs to be fixed.  When you fill certain enclosures you get paid money.  If you subsequently swap a lesser amount of animals into that same enclosure, and then fill it from tiles on a truck… you should get paid AGAIN.  This does not happen in the iPhone version of the game.

Otherwise I am quite excited to be playing one of my favorite Euro games on the iPhone!  The Zooloretto board game has a whole bunch of expansions for it too, so hopefully we’ve got those to look forward to on the iPhone as well.