Tips & Tricks for Director Difficulty

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This guide contains a bunch of tips, tricks and unobvious interactions in Zoominoes. It’s up-to-date as of 2026-08-14. It's addressed at the highest regular difficulty level in the game, Director difficulty; some of its advice will not apply if you care about other things like lower difficulty levels, hunting achievements, completing your collection, winning dailies, or getting highscores during endless mode (Overtime). Note that this guide is not remotely trying to be comprehensive. I won't mention every animal, souvenir, or zookeeper, but just a fraction of them, those I felt like writing about. Director difficulty makes the game harder in a bunch of ways: Daily score targets start higher, increase much faster, and the final day’s target is even higher still. The score goal for day 28 is a whopping 100000 points. You have -1 play, which combined with the much higher score goals means you earn way less money. There’s an extra event every Thursday. This means that you will see roughly a third of all events (8 out of 26) in every run. This both makes the game harder and increases the chance that you'll see events that are particularly detrimental to your current strategy. Your starter deck which initially contains 12 starter animals of 3 types in 4 colors gets an extra 1-point black Ant, plus one of the 12 starters becomes black. This decreases the point average of your deck, lowers the chance of drawing newly added animals, and the two black animals make it harder to play animals where you want them. Points The points displayed on an animal in your deck or hand are a sum of various sources: the animal’s base points value; bonus points from gems; any permanent bonus points gained from snacks or souvenirs or other animals; and any temporary bonus points gained the same way. Some effects permanently double an animal's points. Giving an animal temporary points before permanently doubling its points essentially “retains” its temporary bonus points for future days . Or in numbers: Let's say we have a Crab with 10 base points B, +5 temporary points T, and then we permanently double its points via the Big Cheese snack. Result: The animal gets +15 permanent points P, and next day it has 10 base points B plus 15 permanent points P, or 25 points total. And in general, if you permanently double the points of an animal with B+T points, then on all subsequent days it will have 2B+T base points. Transformation Transforming an animal via a Soda or animal crucially retains its color and its permanent points bonuses . This means that you can use an early-game common animal which gains permanent points to accumulate a few points for a few days, and then once this effect can no longer keep up with the increasing points goals, you can try to transform this animal into a more useful one. And conversely, you can draft an animal in your desired color (a few are even Rainbow-colored), then use a Soda to transform it into the type you want. Spaces Some effects refer to “bonus spaces”. These include not just +points spaces, but all spaces on the board where something special is going on , except the starter space: +play spaces, +coins spaces, x2 spaces, mirror spaces, special event spaces, character-specific bonus spaces, etc. Permanent spaces added via snacks or animals reappear on subsequent days, but in random positions. Temporary bonus point spaces added via animals do not reappear on subsequent days. However, any effect which permanently increases the bonus points of a temporary space by P points essentially turns it into a new permanent bonus space worth P points. Animal Abilities A few animals like Rhino or Frog move after being played. The main benefit from this is that it allows you to benefit from positioning-based effects multiple times: you can reuse bonus spaces multiple times, or get souvenir effects like a corner bonus or a surround-based effect multiple times. In addition, the animal gets position bonuses both from its initial space and its final space. Hand vs. Deck A few effects affect your "hand". These affect only the (by default) 4 animals you can currently play. A few effects affect your "deck". These do not affect your hand but only the animals you have not yet drawn. Here are a few straightforward archetypes which can win on Director difficulty. You don't have to pursue any of them, and doing so isn't necessarily easy, but if you do manage to reach one of them, it should be enough to win even on Director difficulty. Monoculture Deck : Try to turn your entire deck into (mostly) one color and type, then use the rare +play animals (Otter plus the type-specific animal) to generate lots of plays, and win by playing some combination of a lot of animals and a bunch of souvenir interactions. Temporary Powers of Two : Beat the final score goals by stacking a whole bunch of temporary or one-time points-doubling effects together. E.g. Lyrebird, mirror spaces, x2 space, various souvenirs, the Big Cheese snack, etc. Permanent Powers of Two : A straightforward way of beating the final 100k points goal on day 28 is to repeatedly and permanently double a specific animal’s points via souvenirs, spaces, or snacks. Just take care to play around a bunch of events like Talent Scout and Touring Test which explicitly impede this strategy. Vogelkop (uncommon): Starts at 1 point but keeps all points bonuses. Start with applying a few absolute points bonuses, then double its points each day, and you’ll easily out-score 100k points. Bunny (uncommon): When played, Bunny puts a copy of itself into the deck. Unstated is that the copied bunny has the points of the scoring bunny, not the bunny in your hand. For example, if you have a x2 space or a souvenir which doubles an animal’s points, then you can spend all your resources on buffing a Bunny, then double its points, and then next day you'll have a new Bunny with more than double the points of the previous Bunny. You can repeat this process each day and end up with a ridiculously huge Bunny capable of easily beating the final day, though with the caveat that you need enough animal removal to remove the lower-scoring bunnies lest they clog up your deck. If you remove the old Bunny each day, then this is essentially identical to the Vogelkop approach. Starter Deck and Deckbuilding Each character has sets of 3 starter animals, one with an ability and two without. The two starters without abilities are the weakest animals in your deck (besides the added black Ant), only suitable for removal (via e.g. Ghost Pepper snacks, Shark, Crocodile) or transformation (via e.g. Soda snacks, Stork). The good starter animal with abilities is something you should try to incorporate into your strategy or even build around if its effect is powerful enough, as its copies are likely to remain part of your deck for much of the run. This also means that a Character with e.g. a Land starter should lean somewhat towards drafting other Land animals. And conversely, if your weakest 2-point starter is e.g. Sky, that's a slight incentive against drafting Sky animals. On Director difficulty, one of your 12 starters becomes Black. This means that your deck consists of 2 Black animals, 3 other colors à 3 animals, and a final color à 2 animals. When adding the first few animals to your deck, consider this initial color distribution. After all, adding a great animal to your deck won't help much if you can't actually play it. That said, if this problem does occur, you can mitigate it by buying Snowcones in the next shop. Shops Spend ~all your money, provided there's a realistic chance of reducing the number of required Plays until the next shop. After all, there's no Balatro -style Interest mechanic in the game, so there's hardly any benefit to saving money for future shops. For example, buying a Common souvenir in a shop during the first week likely saves you Plays and thus recoups some of its investment by the time the next shop comes aroun