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Fireside Games recently sent me a light hearted, family-weight game recently called Zoomies. It's full of adorable dogs, has a light ruleset but does have room for clever plays and may even keep hardcore gamers interested, especially if they love dogs.
Gameplay: The Setup
With this being a small box, with minimal components, setup is trivial. Pick a colour and grab the eight tokens of that colour. Then shuffle the tiles and place three at random in the center of the table. Place the rest of them to one side, deal two to each player and you're ready to Zoom!
Tiles and Doggos
The tiles in Zoomies are domino-like in their composition. They are rectangular-shaped split in half with a dog on each half. They also may contain a Zoomie or Bone icon, which we will get to in due time.
On your turn you must place a tile, with at least one of the dogs touching a dog of the same species, of which there are five. Chihuahua’s, poodles, beagles, huskies and greyhounds. After that you must place one of your eight tokens on the tile you placed. These tokens offer scoring opportunities and are double sided, making sure you have a few juicy decisions on your turn.
Tokens and Scoring
These tokens come in four varieties, bones, frens, zoomies and leaders and each scores differently with different requirements. WIth them being double sided though, each player’s choice of what to score will be different. It depends on what tiles you have, where you place them and what ‘Packs’ you make.
A pack is a grouping of same breed dogs and will decide how many points are awarded for the scoring tokens. The first and probably easiest scoring token is the leader token. When placing this one, you get a point for each of that type of dog in the pack. Simple. There can also only be one leader per pack.
Bones are the next scoring token and they give two points per bone icon in that pack. Similar to the leader token, you can only have one per pack but the bone icons are not on every tile and picking the right location for this token can be tricky.
Next is the frens token. This one is a little trickier than the others. When you place this one in a pack, you face the arrow at another dog breed outside of the pack it was placed. You then get two points per unique side of your pack that faces the dog breed the token points at. You can have multiple frens tokens in a pack, as long as they point at a different breed.
Lastly, theres the zoomies token. This one is very different, you have to place the token on a dog with the zoomies icon on it and then you get an increasing amount of points per dog attached that also has the zoomies icon on it. Unlike the others, they don’t have to be the same dog and there is a maximum of five. They are very lucrative though and also have an added benefit.
Whenever you p[lace a zoomies icon, all the dogs in your hand also get the zoomies and run off, this allows you to place the second tile in your hand free of charge, following all normal rules and without placing one of your scoring tokens on it. This can lead to some clever plays, adding to your other scoring tiles on the board and getting a leg, or four legs up on your opponents.
Components
Zoomies is just tiles and cardboard scoring tokens. While I love the tiles, the artwork and composition of them is lovely. I found the cardboard scoring tokens very bland and drab in comparison. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they work and there is nothing mechanically wrong with them, they just look and feel a bit of a step down from the lovely tiles also in the box.
Final Thoughts
Zoomies looks overly simple on your first play. However, there is a delicate game underneath that if you plan well, use your zoomies efficiently and look to future turns, it can get quite strategic.
We enjoyed it, it's one of those games that does not demand complete attention, you can teach to anyone and is entertaining while doing so.