Zoomies Review
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Editor's Review
Calling all dog lovers! The game Zoomies is for you! In this game, for two to four players ages 10 and up, you get to be a dog walker. Your goal is to score points by playing dog tiles and scoring tokens. The game comes with 50 dog tiles, 32 double-sided scoring tokens, and instructions.
Each dog tile has two dogs of five possible breeds on it. Breeds include chihuahuas, poodles, beagles, huskies, and greyhounds. One dog on each tile has a bone icon, and some dog tiles will have one dog with the “zoomies”, represented by running dog artwork. The game starts with three randomly selected dog tiles placed faceup next to each other in the middle of the play area. The remaining dog tiles are shuffled, and each player gets two. The remaining are placed facedown as the draw pile.
Each player also chooses a color and takes all eight scoring tokens of that color. These are double-sided for two ways to play them. The four types of scoring options are bones, frens, leader, and zoomies.
On your turn, you will perform three steps: place a dog tile, place a scoring token, and draw so you have two tiles again. When you place a dog tile, it must be placed so that at least one side is touching one side of another tile. And you must match at least one type of dog on your tile. If you can’t play any of your tiles, discard them both, draw two new tiles, and play one of those. What you’re looking to do by playing dog tiles is create a pack, or any grouping of the same breed of dogs. Packs are important to understand for scoring, which we’ll get to in a second.
After placing a dog tile, you’ll play a token on the tile you just played. And if you can’t play one, you must discard one. You could play a leader token, which will score you one point for each dog in that pack. You could play a bones token, which scores you two points for every bone icon in the pack. A frens token can be placed on a dog with the arrow point toward an adjacent dog of a different breed, and scores you two points for every unique side where a dog in the base pack is adjacent to a dog of the frens breed. And zoomies tokens get placed on dogs with the zoomies icon. At the end of the game, you’ll score laddered points for every dog with the zoomies icon in the same group as the dog with your token on it. Keep in mind that nothing is scored until the end of the game, so you might place a token that doesn’t score you any points when played, but at the end of the game, it could score big.
After all players have played or discarded their last token, the game ends. Each player totals their score for every token they placed. The player with the most points wins.
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Should I get it?
This game definitely requires strategic thinking. The first few times you play, you might want to keep the instructions handy so that you remember how to use the scoring tokens and how to score everything. But the basic gameplay of making packs of dogs is easy to learn, and dog lovers will like seeing some of their favorite breeds on the game tiles.
Pros
Basic gameplay is easy to learn
Dog artwork for dog lovers
Requires strategy
Cons
Can be hard to keep track of how to play & score tokens