Frank’s Zoo Card Game Review

Steve Godfrey
58 minutes ago
7 min read

Frank’s Zoo

WBG Score: 5.5

Player Count: 4-7

You’ll like this if you like: Light family card games.

This is a free review copy. See our review policy here

“So you're telling me you have no otters at this zoo of yours!? Well, you'd better have something entertaining or I'm demanding my money back.”

“We have a mouse that can scare the elephants.”

“Ok, I’m back in.”

How to Run a Tiny Zoo

If you're playing the Wild Rumble version, which is the full competitive version, take the animal card deck and deal the cards out evenly to each player. Then make a stack of point cards depending on your player count with the highest at the top and then going in descending order. The aim of the game is to be the first player to empty their hand of cards. Choose a first player (the rulebook says the youngest) and they take the first action.

If there are no cards on the table, which there won’t be on the first turn, then you take a Lead Action. Here you simply play any number of cards of the same animal type onto the table. The next player can either Pursue or Pass. There are two ways you can Pursue. Either play the same species as the previous player but with exactly one more card. The other way is to outrank them. Each animal has a bubble above them with any number of the other animals that will outrank them. To outrank an animal, you need to play exactly the same number of cards that were played but of an outranking animal. There are also two special types of cards: the chameleon, which is a wild card, and the mosquito, which can be played as its own set or you can add exactly one to a set of elephants to act as an elephant.

If you play a set of cards and the turn gets back to you and they haven’t been beaten, then you take all the cards that have been previously played and put them next to you. You then get to take your turn by taking a Lead Action.

When a player empties their hand of cards, they take the next highest point card from the stack. Play keeps going until all but one player has run out of cards. The player with the most points wins. You can either end the game there or play 3-5 rounds and total up your scores from all the rounds to determine the winner.

There’s also a team rumble which you can either play on its own or after you’ve played one round of the Wild Rumble. The round of Wild Rumble will be a factor in deciding random teams based on your score in that game. You could, of course, play without that and just pick your teams. The difference is that the Wild Rumble could serve as a sort of practice round for new players. The team rumble involves having teams of two, each with a junior and a senior per team. This relates to roles you play in the team, not the ages of the players. Let’s be honest, no one wants to have that discussion. At the start of the round, teammates can swap two cards with each other. On the junior player's turn, they can ask for help when taking a Pursue action in which you don’t have enough cards to beat the previous play. They play the cards they have, and the senior player can add cards to that hand if they’ve got them (and if they want to). If not, the junior takes their cards back and passes. When someone goes out, both they and their teammate take the top card of the stack (this will have two of each point card). At the end of the round, add up your points cards, then each player that has at least two lions in their stack will score 1 point per lion. You lose a point if you have no hedgehogs in your stack. If you're the last player with cards in your hand, then you lose 1 point per lion in your hand.

The Old Zoo

Frank’s Zoo has been knocking around since 1999, so with this new version, it's worth assuming that if it’s been around for 26 years, there must be a reason, right? Well, maybe, but I’m not sure I’m the best person to tell you what that is. Yeah, spoilers, I’m not exactly in love with it. I’ve played this with a few different groups, and it's not really been a hit for any of them. That’s not to say that this is a terrible game by any means, and in fact, if you look at the reviews on Board Game Geek, I definitely skew in the minority. So, all I can do here is tell you why it’s not for me. You never know, the things I didn’t like may well be exactly what you're looking for in a game like this.

The Wild Rumble mode is the big letdown for me because how well you do is down to the cards you're given. There’s no starting hand mitigation, no ways to mess with your cards during the game, and no real ways to make a truly clever strategy to make the best of it. It can make or break your game, and you can generally guess how your game is gonna go just by looking at that opening hand. It becomes frustrating when you find yourself constantly saying ‘pass’ not from any strategic standpoint, but because you’ve got no choice. It leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.

There may be some strategy in not playing cards when you can. Maybe if you need three cards to beat something but you have four of that animal in your hand, then I can see the logic in holding back until you can play all of them. It’s a very light strategy and a bit of a gamble to sit on since the opportunity to shed all of those cards at once may not even present itself. Plus, you don't really want cards to loop back to the original player for them to take a lead action to shed yet more cards from their hand. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect light card games like this to have a ton of strategic depth. In fact, there are a lot of great games out there that are just as strategy-light as this, and I love them for it because they’re just fun. Unfortunately, this mode just lacks the fun aspect for me.

My other frustration is the insistence in the rules that if you win a stack, you take it into a personal pile. But then when it comes to scoring, nothing is done with it. It seems like a minor gripe, but I had to keep checking the rules because people kept asking the relevance of it, and I thought I’d missed the reasoning behind it. This rule comes into play in the team rumble mode and has a scoring purpose, so maybe it’s setting some good practice for that, but it would have been nice to at least have let us know that.

A Second Chance?

After one game of Wild Rumble, you can either set up for another round and play maybe 3-5 rounds and see who has the high score or leave it there (my groups decided the latter of those two options), or you could play the team rumble, and this is where the game kinda redeems itself.

A lot of the things that are lacking in the Wild Rumble have some fixes in the team rumble. There’s now some form of mitigation since you can pass cards between teammates. The junior passes two, then the senior passes two back, and it makes for a touch of mitigation that may be invaluable during the game, and it gives teammates a bit of foreknowledge of at least a few of the cards in their teammate's hand. Being able to help a teammate is a nice addition as well and could help you get out of some scrapes, especially on an important play. However, I do find it a bit weird that only the senior can help the junior and not the other way around as well. It’s like the game is trying to help mitigate those less than stellar hands of cards but then immediately throws in a twist at the same time to mess that up.

The scoring is the thing that adds some meat to this variant, though. Just by making the cards in those stacks you win important opens up a lot more opportunities for strategic play. Now holding back cards and voluntary passing makes more sense as you wait for a stack to populate with some of the juicier cards before you unleash that big play to win it. Choosing to pass rather than beating a hand may even push another player to win a less than stellar stack, and I’ve gotta say, it's kinda satisfying when that happens.

For me, the team rumble is my preferred way to play this, and while it does make the game more interesting, I don’t think it’s quite enough to make this a game that I’ll want to bring out above all the other card games that I’ve got in my collection. That being said, you only have to look at a lot of the user reviews on Board Game Geek to know that this seems to be quite popular with families, especially those with younger children, which makes sense as the artwork is fun and visually it’s easier to pick up due to the lack of numbers and text on the cards. So if you're in that young family camp that's looking for a quick, light game to introduce people to, then this could be a game that’s worth looking into. Unfortunately for me, though, this is a game that needs to go to a new enclosure at a different zoo, or more likely someone I know who will love this game more than me. I don’t think zoos take card games.

Right, I’m off to visit my local zoo because I really need to see some otters to make up for the lack of them in this game. Who runs a zoo without otters, honestly.