Last year's Titicaca was a very interesting game that we enjoyed a lot, except Nige couldn't get to grips with the spatial awareness requirements of the game. This year's Cwali release is basically an auction game, but again spatial awareness/pattern recognition is a major element in determining the value of the pieces being auctioned off.

Essentially, the players are competing zoo managers who are trying to develop their zoos to attract customers away from their opponents. Each turn a tile is auctioned off representing a section of zoo. The tile shows the animals that live there, a pathway structure and possibly some trees. Each tile won has to be placed immediately into your zoo and, importantly all the paths have to join up with existing pathways. Once placed, if this gives you a better display for a particular animal type than your opponents (or second best), visitors are diverted to your zoo. The same is true if you have more trees than other players and, if you are able to complete a circular path a new visitor will come to your park. The game is played over five rounds of five auctions and, at the end of each round VPs are awarded according to how many visitors you have in your zoo. Most VPs collected at the end of the game wins.

Money is pretty tight in the game but you really do need to spend early to do well as further income is linked to the number of tiles you have in your zoo. I didn't win any auctions in the first round and so was playing catch-up all game. Nige built early and then concentrated on getting circular pathways because visitors attracted in this way can't be tempted away from your zoo. It proved the winning strategy as Nige won, despite the spatial awareness thing. I enjoyed Zoo Sim a lot and am keen to play again and as the zoos become more developed the play area is very nice to look at. The only fiddly bit I wasn't that keen on was the constant recalculation of who had the best displays of animal type and the consequent movement of visitors. However, that aside, another nice Cwali game for the collection.