 Scott actually played this game before me. You know, he just played it. I've played it two times now. I think you've only played it one time. Yep. But it's the first time I played. I won. I did really well. The second time I played, I just suck so bad. That was awful. It was just awful. Oh, it was absolutely awful. But the thing is, you know, if you're looking for a board game to play, it won this field as yarn. So it's worth buying. And if not, if you if you're looking for recommendations to buy board games, you can listen to us or just go to board game geek and play the top 20. That's pretty much it. Just like 18 of those games are great. Yeah. But basically the way the letter works is you got the zoo and you got to get animals in the zoo, right? And there's three. There's three different patches. There are three different exhibits in your zoo and you can unlock the fourth exhibit, which you pretty much have to do to win, right? And you want to fill each exhibit with one kind of animal. You can't mix the animals. You can't have the elephants and the drafts together. That doesn't work. You got to have, you know, so you want to get four kinds of animals and you don't want any other kinds, right? Every other kind you get, all your extra animals, you have to tie them up in the barn and that's cost you money, but no one can visit the animals in the barn. So you don't get any points for that. You lose points for paying for animals to stay in the barn. So you want to get rid of those guys? So basically there's these trucks that deliver animals and every turn, everyone takes turns. Every round, everyone takes turns filling up the trucks with animals from the Savannah, I guess, or wherever, wherever the poachers collect them from. The zoo next door. Right, wherever the animals come from. So they get piled on the trucks and the animals mix freely on the truck. Now this is the fun part because you got these, you know, five players, there's five trucks. It's kind of like musical chairs of the animals at this point. Every round you draw one of these tiles and you think, all right, what truck do I put it on? So say there's a truck that has two monkeys and I know Scott wants monkeys. I put a fucking bear on that truck. And I don't want bears. So basically rim is saying, aha, Scott, if you want to take these two monkeys, you're gonna have to also take this bear. And it's like, ah. And basically what you do is you look at what everyone else wants and you look at what you got and you try to make trucks that are gonna be good if you take them and bad if other people take them. And by the thing is on your turn, you can either put an animal on a truck or take a truck. You can't do both. So if you draw something that's really good for you, you have to put it on a truck and then you have to wait for everyone else to take their turn before you have a chance of taking that truck. And you know what? Someone else might take that truck from you. So if you make these really good trucks, someone else is just gonna take them and leave you with a crappy truck. And there's some things that can go into the trucks like a coin or a vending stand that are always good. Yep. Just, oh, great. That just points. But they're still not as good as animals that are your kind of animal. That depends. And then right on top of that, there's some animals. Most animals are too young and genderless, but there are few animals that have gone through puberty and can make a babby. Now that's where some of the... So if you can get like a male giraffe and a female giraffe, you get a free giraffe when you get them together in your zoo. Now, that is the aspect of the game. I mean, you know, this is one of those board games that really brings out the German board gamer style playing with the theme, making lewd jokes about smashing sheep into wood. And it really comes out strong in Zulareto. Yep. Lots of babby making jokes there. The thing is, let's say you don't have room for the babby. Oh, no, you get him. He just goes in the bar. All right. And even if you've got a pen full of monkeys, you got one more monkey in the bar now. Well, that's points. Yeah. Negative points. And then there's the money, right? Which you can get from coins and from other things. Like if you fill up an area of your zoo, you get coins. And basically you can use the coins as a corrective measure, right? So it's like, oh shit, I need to unlock the next area of my zoo. So I'll pay coins. Or I need to move these animals. I put them in the wrong section of the zoo. Well, you can use coins. Basically, you can use coins to correct for mistakes that you have made or for things that you didn't really make a mistake. But the odds and the way things turned out, it didn't go your way. If you get enough coins, you can sort of fix it a little bit. You can use coins to get an animal out of someone else's barn, which helps them out, but it also helps you out because you get the animal you want. It gives them a coin also. So then they can correct for something that they messed up a little bit. And the game ends when I think there's no more animals, right? I think so. I forget exactly. You start with a stack of tiles on the table. And when the bag of animals runs out, you start using the stack. But then as soon as you start using the stack at the end of that round, game over. Now, I really like that mechanic. And you know what? I wonder if we could make a slight variation to tickers and Euphrates to use a mechanic like that. We just take some tiles out, put them in a stack, and then when the bag's empty, you start using the stack. Yeah. And then we have some sort of like and run condition, like everyone gets a turn. Something, I think we could come up with an interesting variation. The game doesn't need fixing, all right? Yeah. It's a little. Worry about fixing other games that need fixing. I mean, the only little bit of stagnant stuff I think we could mitigate just by making a slightly different board. I definitely think the board. Yeah. It's just interesting because you know, you wonder when a game that was 99% perfect was made. And then years later, someone has another game that has a similar mechanic and they do one thing slightly differently and slightly better. Like you wonder what effect that would have on the older game. Yeah. Maybe they just didn't think of it. Yep. There's not that much else to say about Zulorado. It's a fun, light game. It's not solved by us yet. We only played it twice. Yeah. You know, it's a whole lot of like this is got a little bit of that chicken going on. Like, you know, like that game where you pass the cards around with the tokens on them. Yep. Yeah. It's exactly, you know, it's like a game of chicken. It's like, all right, you, I'm going to stay in this. I'm not going to take a truck. I'm going to put another animal out there, which is also a lot like raw with the Egyptian slot machine. You're like, I'm going to keep going. Yeah. Well, I'm going to keep going. Yeah. The difference is that in raw, there's one shared slot machine where as in this, it's this separate ones. You know, there's one for each player. So everyone's going to get one every turn. It's just a matter of which one you get and which what's on it. Now, the cool thing is it was made by Michael Schacht. And he also made another game called Coloreto, which is basically the same game. It's the same game, but it's just a card game, right? It's like a small portable version. And I'm not mistaken. And I think there's an expansion. I've never seen this in person, but dude, I've never seen or heard of that. I don't know if it's out yet, but a couple of people have mentioned it when I was poking around. Let's see, wait, this Coloreto and this Coloreto Amazonas. Oh man, there's also expansions for Zulareto, like a petting zoo and some other stuff. Really? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a field this year, a winning game. So of course it's going to have expansions and all that. There's three co-worker tiles for Aquareto. Oh, this all starts. So Aquareto has a dolphin on the cover. The Amazonas Coloreto has a, the Toucan, the regular Coloreto has a chameleon. The main good thing about this game is that you can whip it out in like 20 minutes. Yeah, it's one of those ones that's really quick to learn. It's easy to play. Kids can play, old people can play. It's a great game. Like if you want to play. I think it's actually, you know, to be perfectly honest, right? You always say, oh, if you're introducing someone to a German board game, you know what? I think Zulareto is better than that. You know, if you're, if someone has only played non-good board games, the first good board game that they should play is probably Zulareto. Well, you know what it depends. It's even more, it's got the same sort of fun accessibility of Parkinson, but it's easier. I think it depends on who the person is. I mean, someone like me, before I'd seen the German board game. Okay, yeah, Settlers would be a better choice for a rim type person. You jump right, you know, someone who you know will get it if you just show them that the game is not random bullshit like Monopoly. No, then Settlers is fine. Hell, Puerto Rico is probably fine for someone like that. But for someone who, you know, you're not sure, Zulareto is probably gonna get him because it's super fun, super short. And if you wanna play a German board game with a bunch of other German board gamers, but none of you have a game in common, a situation we run into a lot at Nerd NYC, where I just wanna play a game I already know. I just wanna have fun, play a game, but no matter what game I pick, at least one person at the table has never played it. So I'm gonna have to teach for like an hour. This game takes 20 minutes to teach, 20 minutes to play. Yep. It's really quick to play Zulareto. It's real easy to learn. It's pretty just great all around. Now, one thing it's gonna be on the Wii as far as I can tell. I think it's already on the iPhone and the iPad, yeah. We'll see when, I'll bet they're gonna make an iPad version at some point soon. Yeah, it's understandable. I mean, it's, you know, how this kind of game could become really popular all around. And you know what? I think that's about it, short show, but there's not that much to say. It's a great game. Definitely I'm thinking about getting one of the card versions, because that's something you can carry on with you everywhere and play at any moment, right? It's like Dominion, you could play at any moment be to carry a big box of cards. I'm just gonna buy Zulareto. I definitely need like a couple of games that are like the small individual, right? The games I have that are just a pack of cards, you know, like say, or like a flux. Yeah, something like that. They're more complicated, whatever. You know, I really need a game like, you know, the Zulareto Colorado kind of game where it's just a small thing of cards, ultra portable, but you can whip it out and play it with anybody at any time, just strangers, freaking anybody, children, yeah, parking lot, old people. I think I'll buy Zulareto and Accra letter though, because I need to own more games that I can bring to like an event that is gamey, but isn't like super Germany to just start introducing more people to these games. But it's still a quality. Yep, cause I really, especially now I'm in the city, I have a vested interest in just finding people and be like, look, these games are awesome play of them because it'll spread rapidly through social circles that I think can come right back to me and make more players for myself. I'm going to try this out. I want to see if I can personally expand the sphere of German gaming in like Manhattan in the next few years. Go for it. Yeah, sort of the shot. And I can bring it home and play it with like my mom. Yep. All right, we'll just stop right there. I think that's a good show. This has been Geek Nights with Rima and Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Cat Lee for web design and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion news and more. Remember, Geek Nights is not one but four different shows, SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience, but unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.