Cube Zoo: Breeding Island

Your grandmother ran a small zoo on an island. The sea took half of it. What is left is a few pens, the debt on them, and her breeding notebook: twenty-four species listed in her handwriting, and most of the pages still blank.

Pair two cube animals and wait out the egg. The hatchling takes its coat colour, its brightness and its body size from both parents at once, so it lands somewhere between the two and never exactly on either. Sometimes it also keeps the other parent's tail, wings or horns, and then you are looking at an animal that exists nowhere else.

A session is short on purpose. Your animals bank coins where they stand, even while the app is shut, so you open it, tap them, take the takings, and spend it on the next pairing. Eggs run from one minute to thirty depending on how rare the parents are. Then you close it again.

WHAT THE NOTEBOOK HOLDS

- Coat colour, brightness and body size all mix from the two parents
- Up to three hatchlings in ten wear the other parent's tail, wings or horns
- Fifteen pairings hatch a third species instead of either parent
- Twenty-four species to find, from Cat and Chick up to Panda and Polar Bear
- Shiny animals turn up around one time in forty and earn two and a half times as much
- Animals keep banking coins while the app is closed, so a two-minute visit pays
- Name every animal yourself, or take one from the book of names
- Eight letters from your grandmother, each delivered when the zoo reaches it
- Plays in English, Korean, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese

The common animals you buy. Everything rarer has to be bred, and each tier comes from the tier below, so the Panda at the back of the notebook is a long line of pairings that starts with a Cat and a Dog. Thirty-eight goals mark the way, the inspector grades the zoo as it fills, and pen space is the only real limit on how many pairs you can run at once.

No energy bar. No lives. No timer that punishes you for going to bed. Nothing in the zoo dies, nothing gets sick, and a pairing never fails. It plays offline, needs no account and no sign-in, and there is no friend list because there is nobody else on the island.

Free, with ads. One full-screen ad turns up after some hatches, on the way back to the pen, never during play. The rest are optional: a button you press when you want to double what you just collected, hatch an egg early, or take five gems. Nothing in the game is locked behind watching one. There are no purchases of any kind.

Fill the notebook.