I got a review copy of Zooloretto, latest entry to the Coloretto family. It’s out now in Finnish (with Swedish, Norwegian and Danish rules included). The box was bigger than I expected, a full Kosmos-size box. Cute panda!

The game isn’t a ripoff, but something quite clever. In its heart lies the basic Coloretto system: you either add to the sets or take one. The aim is to collect lots of certain types of items and avoid others. Here you are filling your zoo with animals, and the extra animals are bad for you.

There are some twists, though. You can shuffle the animals around a bit using money, you can buy extra space or even the animals someone else has deemed unnecessary and stored away — you can get necessary critters, but at the same time you help your opponent.

I played with Johanna and the two-player game worked pretty well. Nothing spectacular, but I expect the multi-player game to be better. The game seems quite good, really, as a family game. There’s some interaction between players, but nothing too nasty — though the game has a mean streak somewhere there.