Wouter & Ymke 
The zoo is closed, the visitors have gone home, and apparently that was the perfect moment for some of the animals to sneak out. Now they need to get back before the zookeepers notice. In Night at the Zoo, we help them by building paths through grass, rocks and sand, then guide them towards the zoo in the middle of our board.
The animals don’t exactly make our job easy. Penguins slide across the board, snakes care about which way they’re facing, butterflies collect pollen along the way, and sloths regularly decide that getting home can wait until after a nap. Designed by Tomáš Holek, Night at the Zoo is a fairly accessible tile-placement game, with most of its decisions coming from how you use the tiles you’re given. It’s also one of the games Albi will be showing at Spiel Essen ’26.
👥 1-4 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Tomáš Holek
🎨 Artwork: Tereza Kovandová
🏢 Publisher: Albi (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
A game of Night at the Zoo lasts three rounds, with five drafts in each round. Everyone has their own player board containing a 5×5 neighbourhood with the zoo in the centre. During the game, you’ll fill this neighbourhood with terrain tiles and use the paths you’ve created to move your animals towards the zoo. At the end, whoever has the most victory points wins.
Each draft starts with a shared market containing one action tile per player, plus one extra. Every tile has one of three terrain types: rocks, grass or sand. They can also contain action or food symbols. You choose one tile in turn order, with the unchosen tile moving to the leftover area.
Once you’ve drafted a tile, you can place it in your neighbourhood, store it in your warehouse or discard it to make a special move. Tiles placed in your neighbourhood form the routes your animals use, but they can also cover spaces printed on your board. Depending on the space, placing the right terrain or symbol can discover another animal, give you a bonus tile, provide movement or score points. Some bonuses require two spaces to be covered with matching terrain. Once you’ve placed a tile, you can’t move it somewhere else.
Each game uses three of the six animal species, with every player controlling three animals of each. One of each species starts ready to move, while the others need to be discovered. Normal movement takes an animal to an orthogonally adjacent tile, but each species has its own rules. Penguins slide as far as possible in a straight line, cheetahs get an additional step during special movement, snakes need movement to change direction, butterflies can collect pollen, and sloths alternate between moving and sleeping. Wolves don’t change movement, but score increasingly well if you return more of them to the zoo.
Your warehouse can hold two tiles. Discarding a tile instead lets you move every animal currently standing on its terrain type, so getting several animals onto grass before discarding a grass tile can move all of them at once. The tiles left behind during drafting matter too. At the end of each round, the most common terrain in the leftover area gives every discovered animal standing on that terrain one movement.
After the third round, animals that reached the zoo score according to their species. Each discovered animal left outside scores one point. You also score your best set of different food symbols among the tiles in your neighbourhood, with larger sets worth progressively more points.
Artwork & Components
Night at the Zoo uses deep purple and blue across its boards, with the terrain appearing in much brighter red, green and yellow-orange. An empty neighbourhood looks quite dark, but by the end it’s usually covered in irregular terrain tiles and wooden animals. The contrast works well in practice, and despite the amount of information on a completed board, we never had much trouble seeing where one terrain type ended and another began.
The illustrations by Tereza Kovandová have a slightly unusual storybook look that I like. The animals aren’t trying to look realistic, and each has plenty of character. There are quite a few symbols spread across the tiles and boards, but the white iconography is easy enough to pick out against the backgrounds.
I particularly like the wooden animals. There are separate shaped and printed pieces for every species rather than generic meeples. The sloth makes particularly good use of this. When it falls asleep, you physically put the piece on its side and stand it back up when it wakes. It’s a tiny thing, but seeing several sloths lying around the board while everyone else gets on with escaping fits the game rather well.
Our Experience
We understood the basic turn fairly quickly, but our first boards weren’t exactly examples of good zoo planning. We tended to look at the tile we’d just drafted and find somewhere useful for it. A route towards the centre seemed like an obvious choice until we’d placed the tile and noticed that another position could have triggered a board bonus. Chase too many bonuses instead, and you could end up with a collection of useful spaces that didn’t actually lead an animal anywhere.
The warehouse was easy to neglect. Leaving a tile there felt less productive than putting it onto the board, so initially we didn’t use it as much as we probably should have. Saving specific terrain became much more useful once we started getting several animals onto matching spaces before discarding that tile. A single discard moving three or four animals was considerably nicer than spending separate movement on each of them. There were also a few occasions when someone noticed that possibility just before another player was about to point it out. The resulting “yes, I saw it” wasn’t always entirely convincing.
Food caught us out more seriously. In one game, we thought somebody was clearly behind because they’d returned fewer animals than the rest of us. Then we scored their collection of food and they won. After that game, carrots and eggs received considerably more respect during the draft. We also started keeping a closer eye on the leftover area towards the end of a round, especially when one terrain type was beginning to dominate.
The animals produced a few less dignified moments. We’ve tried to move sleeping sloths and had snakes facing precisely the wrong way when we needed them. The sloth mistake has happened more than once. Apparently putting the wooden piece flat on the table isn’t enough of a clue for us. Some turns also became unexpectedly long when one placement triggered another action, which provided another tile or movement and led somewhere else. With four players, those turns can leave the other three waiting for a while.
Three players has been our preferred count. Two is quick, but at three we paid more attention to which tiles the others might take and what could end up in the leftover area. We’d play with four, though I don’t think that’s where I’d choose to play it. The extra waiting doesn’t add anything I particularly missed at lower counts. We haven’t played the solo mode, so can’t comment on that.
Our Thoughts
Most of what I enjoy about Night at the Zoo comes from tiles being useful in several places at once. A tile might continue the route you actually need, cover a board space you’d really like to activate and contain a food symbol you’re missing. Or perhaps you shouldn’t place it at all. Fifteen drafts isn’t enough to do everything, and as the neighbourhood fills, earlier placements start deciding what is even possible. By the final few drafts, we were often deciding what not to finish. An animal sitting one movement away from the zoo is particularly annoying when you know getting it there means giving up something better elsewhere.
Six species feels enough for the games we’ve played, but I can already see where repetition will eventually come from. Different animals change the routes we build and how we use movement, but they don’t change what we’re doing with the tiles themselves. The board is fixed and the same placement considerations keep returning. Some species are also easier to work with than others, and certain combinations make getting animals home noticeably easier. I don’t think they’re equally difficult to play well. There is already a Latecomers expansion with four more species, but we haven’t played it and I don’t want to judge the base game on content that comes in another box.
There’s some luck in the draft as well. We’ve had turns where another player took the one tile we really wanted and the remaining choices didn’t do much for us. Usually you can at least find somewhere to put an awkward tile, but sometimes you’re simply getting the worse end of the draft. That’s more irritating late in the game, when there are fewer spaces left and you need something fairly specific. It hasn’t dominated any of our games, but it’s there.
Most of the competition stays in that shared draft. Nobody can enter your neighbourhood or undo what you’ve built, and apart from taking a tile somebody else wanted, you’ll mostly leave each other alone. We were fine with that. I wouldn’t pick Night at the Zoo when we’re in the mood to annoy each other, but there are plenty of other games for that.
I’d happily play this with people who mostly stick to lighter family games, and I don’t think I’d be bored joining them. The basic objective is easy to understand, the animals give you a few odd problems to deal with, and there’s enough room to get better at using your tiles without turning the game into homework. I don’t expect the base game to keep changing after dozens of plays, but we’ve enjoyed our time with it and I’d gladly bring it back to the table. Preferably with someone else responsible for waking the sloths.
📝 We received a copy of Night at the Zoo from Albi.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? We’re reviewing a selection of this year’s new releases. You can find all our other Spiel ’26 reviews here.
