You just get to pick a spot to move the elephant and then you move to it. And then you do the thing on the spot you landed on. It’s all up to you.

That’s the entire propulsive force of New York Zoo, a game about filling in a square-ish grid with tetromino pieces. And then filling those pieces with animals to score special pieces which let you finish your board faster.

A mid-game photograph of the board game New York Zoo in play, taken from an angled overhead perspective on a red tablecloth. The player board shows a partially filled zoo grid covered with green enclosure tiles depicting various animals such as bears and flamingos. Several wooden animal meeples in orange, black, and white are placed across the board, representing animals in their enclosures. A pink wooden piece sits in the upper section of the board near illustrated zoo buildings. Additional unused enclosure tiles are visible to the right, off the board, waiting to be placed.

And it feels weird. Moving the elephant, I mean.

It’s stuck to my brain every time I’ve played the game and I’ve tried to tease out exactly what it means. It’s stuck in my brain to the point where I’ve wondered exactly why this specific mechanic in this specific game has stuck with me.

Most games constrain what you can do. They tell you “do this thing first and then deal with the results” (roll some dice and move in Monopoly). Or they might say, “deal with what the other player has done” (Uno comes to mind). Even there games that are more open feel more constrained. You either get to take some cards or you get to play some pieces (Ticket to Ride).

Box cover for the board game "New York Zoo" by Uwe Rosenberg, published by Feuerland. The illustrated cover features four cartoon animals — a kangaroo, a penguin, a white fox or arctic wolf, and a pink flamingo — standing together on a grassy area in front of a stylized blue silhouette of the New York City skyline, including the Statue of Liberty. The game title is displayed in large white text on a dark chalkboard-style banner at the top.

So why does New York Zoo feel so different? It’s not all that different from action selection. You’re either going to grab some animals to populate your zoo or you’re going to grab a tile to expand it. (Both move you towards your goal of filling in all of the squares). And there are constraints. You have to move between 1 and 4 spaces. In fact, it’s not all that different from Rosenberg’s other game Patchwork where you can pick a number of spaces to move forward. But that has the constraint of if you move far enough forward your opponent might get to take a couple of turns before you go again.

It’s a cute shared elephant. That you’re moving along a circular track. Why does this feel so different to my brain?

Part of this has to do with how many games present themselves. This has expanded in recent years, but for the most part turn structures in games try to maintain some sort of consistency in order to give players footholds to understand what to do.

Draw a card and take your turn. Play a card. Play or draw a card. Pick an action. Games tend to constrain your behavior so that every turn is roughly worth the same increment of game time, on average.

And, I suspect, New York Zoo does some of this under the hood too.

But!

There is no counterbalance in New York Zoo. On certain parts of the game as you pass over, you trigger animal breeding events which lets everyone with those animals add more of those animals to their pens. And how often those events occur is wholly up to the players. If each player moves one space, it’s going to take a while to get around the track. If each player moves four, you’re going to be zooming around thetrack breeding left and right.

The shape of the play experience is in the hands of the players, not the game. And that feels weird.

The few times I’ve taught this game explaining this rule to players often leads to confusion. “What do you mean I pick a number? How am I supposed to know what number to pick?”

Most games propel you forward at their own pace. The choice you make is less about the length of the game and more about its shape. Are we going to push the narrative in this direction or the other. And especially smaller, more economic oriented games, this is doubly so.

But the narrative of that simple elephant track is really interesting. It offers no punishment to the player picking. No constraints. Just a decision about a shared journey that everyone gets a say in.