Zoomies.

Zoomies is a new Kingdomino-like game of tile-laying with a cutesy puppies theme that underscores this game’s main appeal to kids. It’s very light and you only have eight turns in the entire game, but there isn’t a whole lot of opportunity for strategy within it, making it a bit of a chore for the adults to play.

In Zoomies, players will place domino-like tiles that have two squares on them showing any of five different dog types, with some squares also bearing special symbols for bones or for dogs with zoomies. (If you’re unfamiliar with this phenomenon, it’s when a dog gets so excited by something they run around like crazy for a minute or two to get the energy out. My dog does this pretty much any time someone comes home from an absence of more than an hour.) You must place a tile so that at least one square on it matches an adjacent tile already on the shared tableau, after which you get to place one of your eight scoring tokens on the tile.

There are four varieties of scoring tokens, which are two-sided, so you don’t have to use all four kinds over the course of a single game. The Leader token lets you claim a “pack” of contiguous squares of the same dog type (and background color), scoring one point for every dog within the pack at the end of the game. The Bones token gives you two points for every dog within that pack (which may have a Leader token on it, even from another player) with the bones symbol on it. The Frens token points to an adjacent dog type, and scores you two points for every dog of that other breed that touches the pack where the Frens token sits. The Zoomies token scores you an escalating number of points based on how many adjacent dogs of any breed have the zoomies icon on it, up to 15 for a group of 5 such squares.

You must place a tile and a token on every turn, so the game only lasts eight rounds, by which point the tableau takes up a lot of the table, anyway. Because the tokens are two-sided – Leader/Zoomies and Bones/Frens – you do have an added decision to make when choosing a token to place, since it eliminates the chance of using the other side in the future. The opportunities for any kind of planning are very limited, however, and you usually don’t have many options on your turn that make any sense. My stepdaughters liked the theme, but the older one seemed to lose interest in the game as it went along, and my wife and I both agreed the gameplay was thin. Depending on who’s playing, I think I’d rather play Kingdomino or the excellent kids’ version, Dragomino.