Trapped: The Zoo (Play at Home)

An easy day at the zoo

It’s the day you’ve been waiting for – your annual trip to the zoo! The meerkats have escaped and your mission is to track down the missing meerkats and safely return them to their enclosure. Can you find them all before anyone notices? Good Luck, The future of the zoo is in your hands!

I have no idea why this story starts with an annual trip to the zoo, surely one should go to the zoo far more frequently than that?! Ignoring that oversight, we were looking forward to this game as it was considered to be the easiest of the games in Trapped Series Two, the theme was one we enjoy, and our brains were frazzled so we wanted some light fun.

This was the third game we played in the new releases from Trapped, having decided to play from hardest (Flight 927), through the medium (Mission to Mars) to easiest (this one), and we managed to fit this game into a lunch break when it was a bit warm to go for a walk. We did wonder if we had been overly optimistic, but as we completed this game in 20minutes with no hints, it is definitely an easy game.

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

This is definitely not a game for enthusiasts or hardcore puzzlers. However, this could be a game for their families as it is perfect for introducing inexperienced players to some of the more typical escape room puzzles that we often come across. Trapped do clearly label this game as ‘easy’ so they can’t be blamed for us completing it in 20 minutes – we’re not really the target market here.

Rather than just pieces of paper and puzzles to solve, this game felt a bit more interactive and probably quite well suited to be a rainy day activity for families to play. I’ll cover it more in ‘puzzles’, but this game had activities that I imagine children would quite enjoy, building enclosures for meerkats and collecting a meerkat for every puzzle you solve seems like something little people would love.

If it were me, and I was wanting to give the gift of a zoo outing (or meerkat feeding experience) to someone, I think I would have them solve this game first and then give them the gift of tickets after.

PUZZLES

It has been said before, but this game is easy, really easy. Don’t take that as a bad thing, you just need to give it to the right target audience and I think they will love it. I’d certainly enjoy playing this game with my niece (when she is calm enough to sit still for 30 minutes), in fact it would probably be less stressful than taking her to the zoo!

As I alluded to earlier this game has a lot of the common escape room style puzzles in it; logic, cyphers, simple maths, observation, spatial relations, and then for good measure – a bit of origami. If The Early Learning Centre made a game designed for ‘Getting your kids addicted to escape rooms’, then this would be it.

If you have played escape rooms before, and are experienced, you will spend no time at all solving these puzzles. In fact, in the time it took Liz to battle with some origami, I had completed all but one of the puzzles (hence why I had to write this review). Then just when we thought this game was over, there was one final puzzle to solve.

CLUE SYSTEM

I’d imagine that this game would be set up by a parent who would then operate as the gamesmaster and oversee the little ‘uns. Even if the parental unit is operating as the GM they can still take part in the fun and should anyone get stuck and need help, Trapped have used their usual tried and tested clue system to get you back on track.

I think the reason I like this system so much is because someone can’t just quickly sneak a peek, you have to use the decoded card and follow a clever system in order to make sense of the clue booklet. Each puzzle has a number on it so you can get help on anything you need, or get the final solution – one way or another, you will collect those meerkats!

FINAL THOUGHTS

This is the perfect family game if you want to get your little ‘uns interested in escape rooms. Get them away from the computer, and put this game in front of them. It is good clean fun that will get their brains whirring away!

We did encounter one issue, we think. We believe that our origami bits were possibly misprinted, but even then we were still able to work it out and complete the puzzle. We did get an early version of the game so there’s a very good chance this will have been picked up and fixed in the next print run.

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Note-taking implements may be useful
• Pen/Pencil
• Calculator (Optional)
• Scissors

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players

Time Taken:  20 minutes

Website: Available from a number of escape rooms or on Amazon

*Disclaimer: we weren’t charged for this experience and it was gifted by Golden Bear, but this has not influenced our review