Zoominoes: the deckbuilder that turns a zoo into a runaway number machine

Ever since a certain joker-card game got everyone hooked on watching numbers climb, the number-go-up genre keeps reinventing itself. Zoominoes adds its own touch: a zoo, animal tiles to combine and treats to stuff them with until the score goes off the rails. It is simple, it is clever, and it triggers exactly the little dopamine hit you come for.

The context

Zoominoes is published by Starlight Games and available on PC via Steam. It is a tile-based roguelike deckbuilder entirely turned toward one idea: combining cards to score as many points as possible. You build the ultimate zoo by finding powerful mythical animals, boosting them with treats and souvenirs to create combos, and manipulating the board itself. Tagged puzzle, strategy and card game, it fully owns its kinship with the wave of number-go-up roguelikes, while seeking its own flavour on the tile-placement side.

The gameplay

The heart of the game is the quest for the combo that runs away. You combine animal tiles on a board, upgrade your critters with treats and souvenirs, and the goal is always the same: to push the score as high as possible by chaining synergies. This loop is perfectly calibrated for the genre's gentle addiction: every run becomes a puzzle where you look for the arrangement that multiplies points rather than adding them, and the satisfaction, when a well-thought-out board starts spitting astronomical numbers, is exactly the one you expect.

What sets Zoominoes apart is the marriage of deckbuilding with tile manipulation on a board. Where many number-go-up roguelikes are played in hand, here spatial placement adds an extra layer of thought: positioning the right animal in the right spot, exploiting adjacencies, manipulating the board to trigger cascades, all of it enriches decision-making. Collecting increasingly powerful mythical animals keeps progression and curiosity alive, and the urge to try a new combination endlessly restarts the famous "one more run". Replayability is wired into the variety of combos to discover.

The limits are the now well-known ones of the genre. The depth rests on experimentation and the hunt for the broken build, and a player who does not click with this logic of the climbing number will quickly find the loop repetitive. The balance, by nature, leaves some synergies clearly stronger than others, which can flatten the diversity of truly viable strategies over the very long term. Zoominoes does not fundamentally reinvent the formula, it dresses it nicely and adds its tile dimension, which is enough to make it endearing without lifting it to the rank of the genre's behemoths.

The other reservation is the inevitable comparison with the number-go-up references. In a genre that has become very crowded, Zoominoes has to exist against heavyweights, and while it holds up honourably thanks to its zoo identity and its tile system, it does not have the same dizzying depth as the best. It is a very good representative of its category, clever and charming, rather than a revolution. For its price and its ambition, it is a contract perfectly fulfilled.

The tech

Technically, Zoominoes bets on a colourful, legible art direction perfectly suited to its subject. The zoo theme brings freshness and warmth, and above all the display of combos and scores stays clear even when the board starts multiplying points everywhere, which is vital in a game where understanding why your combo works is part of the pleasure. Legibility is there, an indispensable condition of the genre.

The technical reservations are minimal. The run-restart loop is smooth and frictionless, essential for a roguelike you chain, and the whole runs without a hitch. A few tooltips would benefit from better explaining the sharpest interactions between animals and upgrades, because the game hides a depth its interface does not always reveal upfront, but nothing that truly slows the pleasure of experimentation.

The verdict

Zoominoes is a very good roguelike deckbuilder, which takes the addictive number-go-up formula and enriches it with a clever tile-placement dimension on a zoo backdrop. Its quest for the runaway combo is perfectly calibrated, its collection of mythical animals keeps curiosity alive, and its colourful dressing makes it endearing. For genre fans, there is immediate pleasure and real replayability here.

Its limits are those of its category: a loop resting on experimentation, imperfect balance, and a depth that does not quite reach that of the number-go-up behemoths. But in its register, Zoominoes is a clever, charming representative that fulfils its contract efficiently. If you love watching numbers climb to the absurd while fine-tuning a board, this little zoo is worth a visit.

A clever, addictive roguelike deckbuilder that turns a zoo into a delicious runaway number machine.

Score: 7/10

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Reviewed on the PC version.