Zip City

Game 15 of the “Bailey Family Summer 2023 Board Game Bonanza” is “Zip City,” played by Jack (8.).

“Zip City” is a “Logi Quest” solo puzzle game where you have to lay pieces of a track onto a grid in order to get coloured marbles from the start to the allotted endpoints.

The game is separated into multiple different puzzles, of which there are 40 included. Each puzzle gives you the starting point of the marbles, the required endpoint, and usually, one or two pieces already put in place. You then use a given set of other pieces to guide all marbles into the correct end space.

This is a fairly common concept, and there are lots of other games like this out there. “Feed Me” is a personal favourite of mine and one that I have reviewed in the past. You kind of know what you’re getting into with these types of games – an ever-increasingly difficult amount of puzzles. However, once you’ve completed those, there’s not a lot else to do with them.

In terms of whether this game is for you, it largely depends on what you are looking to get out of it. Generally speaking, we have stopped buying these types of games purely because, while they are well-liked when they are bought, they rarely ever hold our attention once those initial challenges have been completed. This one, I suspect, would be no different, which is why we played it at the board game cafe and didn’t purchase it.

That having been said, “Zip City” is generally a really nice game. The pieces are well-made. My only slight gripe is that when it is held up, the marbles do not always flow all the way down into the bottom and sometimes get stuck in the middle of the track. This can make it seem like the solution was wrong, even though according to the answers, it is correct. In the end, we had to prop the track up slightly to get some of the answers to work correctly.

This is a decent example of a solo puzzle game, and if that is something your child really enjoys and gets a lot out of, there could be some fun to be had here.