The State of the Zoo

Grab Bag Zoo is a game I have been co-designing with Mike Harrison-Wood since before Covid hit us. Literally just before the pandemic - we had our first playable prototype in January of 2020, with the lockdowns in the UK starting in March. This would have been problematic for most projects, but this one had the extra problem of being a game that relies massively on tactility to work (with players feeling in a cloth bag for the token that they want), so an online version just isn't viable for the foreseeable future.

As a result of all this (and the difficulty I have had in getting regular in-person testing set up since the effects of the pandemic have faded), the game has made very slow progress, but we have managed to iterate steadily, and while we are regularly finding issues with it, the game always seems to entertain.

The current Grab Bag Zoo prototype.
So compact compared to what it used to be.

When we first started, there were over 50 animal tokens in the game and each player had their own bag. This swiftly reduced and we now have a single, shared bag and only 24 animals.

The game has a fast and frenetic style of play, but we wanted to include some way to make multiple plays rewarding so, for example, if you win a game once, your next play is more challenging. We've tried a staged "campaign" style play, a set of elements that get added to the game depending on whether you win or lose, and so on. They all seemed OK, but not quite right.

We've now got to a variation where there are a small pile of challenge cards, each defining how many animals that you need to collect, how much time you have to do it, and any other special rules for that challenge. There is a simple one to start with, and then you can simply choose a challenge you want to try next, with the overall objective to eventually complete every one. This seems to be working well and with a minimum of fuss, though I am certain that there is some fine tuning to be done on the various challenge cards.

The game is also fitting into an ever smaller box.

At the moment we are taking a bit of a breather, but have the great news that a publisher (no, I'm not going to say which) is currently taking a look at it. This is just the first stage down the publication road and that road has very many off-ramps, so it is still most likely that nothing comes of it, but we hope that at the least we should get some useful feedback. Fingers crossed.