The Happy Puzzle Company Zooligans Review

Reviewed by Deborah Banasko

I am a huge fan of the Happy Puzzle Company as they make such quality toys and games, so I was delighted to be sent a review from them. We received Zooligans, which is a logic game that can be played alone or with friends, recommended from ages 8 and above.

The box is very appealing to children, depicting cartoon animals getting up to mischief. Inside are 60 challenge cards with solutions on the back, a stand, plus 5 location tiles, animal tokens, activity tokens and time tokens.

The challenge cards are numbered and designated a level, for example levels 1-10 are “intern” whilst 51-60 are “super sleuth”.

Your role in the game is that of the animal detective, and you have to find out which animals have managed to escape during the night and which of these “zooligans” is responsible for each part of the chaos, where it happened and at what time. You will be given clues to help you to figure this out alone or with a team of detective friends.

To begin, you select a challenge card but be careful not to look at the answer on the back. The level and which tiles and tokens are needed is printed at the top of the card, so for example 1A is level 1 and you gather all of the cards which are labelled with “A”. You must position the location tiles required so that they have at least one shared edge and use the challenge card to work out their arrangement. Then, use the clues on the challenge card to decide where the animal, activity and time tokens should be positioned on the location tiles. Each location tile must contain only one animal and one activity. Once you solve the challenge and work out which animal is responsible for each naughty action, you can check if you are correct by looking at the back of the challenge card.

This game levels starts off easy which is helpful as you start to get the hang of it, but don’t let it fool you as by the end you really need to focus! For the purposes of the review, my 8-year-old, 11-year-old and I chose a selection of challenges at different levels but I would suggest starting at 1 and working upwards so that you adapt gradually to the increasing difficulty.

My 8-year-old is bright, but he struggled as the levels became harder which I guess is the whole point, as they even forced me to think hard. It is a game that can grow with your age and ability. That is the beauty of it as you have the satisfaction of beating a challenge that a few months ago, your child would not have been able to tackle.

This is a game which will last some time, as you will generally do a few challenges each time you get the game out. Once you have cracked them all I’m not sure if you would want to re-visit them, but as I have three children we will get a lot of use out of this.

This is a really compact game to store away which makes it great for taking on holiday too. The graphics and colours are fantastic and very appealing to kids. A point that my 8-year-old made was that he wished there were a few more different animals, locations and “crimes” to make it more varied rather than just being about the logic side of things, and I am inclined to agree.

I love the idea of this sort of game for Summer, as kids are using their brains less and we can all get a bit lazy so a game which gets the grey matter working is always going to get a thumbs up from me, plus it can be played alone which will give parents a bit of a break and keep the boredom at bay as it really is a fun game. With my older daughter we had a competition to see who could crack the most elements of each challenge, and sadly she generally beat me.

The age recommendation of 8 plus which is fair as, whilst a younger child could do the easier ones, they would start to struggle pretty quickly and this is definitely a game for an older primary/early secondary child and their parents. I am happy with the price point of £16.99, when you consider the amount of game play that you get for your money.

I would award this game 4.5 stars out of 5.

Rating overall: 4.5/5 stars

RRP: £16.99

You can purchase this product from The Happy Puzzle Company here.