18ZOO is an 18xx game set in a fictional ZOO, designed for 2-4(5) players and playable in about 100 minutes:
- it is playable as a welcoming 18xx game, since many convention/rules are already in place, to let enter new players comfortably into the genre (i.e. they will find villages, dits, cities, shares, tokening, etc...)
- it is playable as the quickest knife fight among veterans/pro 18xxers: poisoned trains, few tiles, token battle, lot of incentives in buying train (+rust).

It's like 1860 and 1849 had a son which married the daughter of 18DIXIE and 18CZ. "Sweet like mommy and a bad boy like daddy" said the fairy godmother 1846

There are many features that makes it high ly distinguishable:

Map is modular- it can be combined and customized
All money of the game are multiple of 25$ (called a Bag of 25 Nuts).
No need to compute any division or percentage during the game
POWERS (privates) bend some rule in a FUN and exciting way - 16 out of 20 appear throughout the game
Companies are opened in a sort of ring order - first choice (and second choice) will set the game
RUN have a growing threshold in order to increase the stock value - the goal of route building is to be efficient throughout all ORs, instead of trying to achieve a local best run
Revenue of a RUN is pre-calculated - best run is an efficient run
Villages are called O (water pond), and their revenue is high since they give money into the treasury and to the run
Villages and Hills/Moutains (M and MM) are not upgradable (generally) so that route building is different in each game.

The goal of the design of 18ZOO is to have a game that last only 90-120 minutes, with the full narrative of a 18xx (both Stock Shenanigans and Operative Shenanigans), approachable by a wider audience (low calculus involved).

Open Rails Origins