The comparisons to Terraforming Mars are everywhere and they’re fair, this is a card driven engine builder about optimizing a system, here a zoo instead of a planet, with animal cards, sponsors, and conservation projects all pulling you in different efficient directions at once. The action selection is a personal little rondel each player manages independently, flexible enough that it never feels like you’re waiting on a shared resource, which at two players specifically makes this one of the better dense euros I own, since neither of us is fighting the other for the same action slot.

I won’t pretend the complaints I’ve seen about downtime and length are wrong, they’re just less relevant at two. A four player game can genuinely stretch past three hours with real waiting between turns since most actions are small individual steps building toward a bigger play. At two it moves briskly enough that I don’t mind, closer to ninety minutes once we both know our decks, though setup, sorting the animal deck, laying out the conservation board, dealing sponsor cards, still eats a real ten to fifteen minutes every single time, which for a weeknight matters more to me than it probably should.

The iconography is dense enough that we both kept the reference sheet in hand for a solid six or seven plays before it started to click without checking, and I won’t pretend that onboarding cost is nothing, but the animal photography on every card is genuinely beautiful and does actual work teaching you to recognize real species, which is a nice bit of texture most euros don’t bother with. Cost per hour has been excellent for us specifically because it keeps earning repeat plays, the university and conservation project decks alone reshuffle strategy enough that play twelve still feels distinct from play one.

Four stars. A genuinely great two player euro, just budget real setup time and don’t go in expecting a short one.