Pandasaurus Games Dinosaur World - Strategy Board Game - Game for Adults, Family-Friendly Board Games - 60 Mins, 2-4 Players, Ages 10+

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Dinosaur World was designed by Brian Lewis - co-creator of the original Dinosaur Island and its expansion, Totally Liquid - Marissa Misura and David McGregor, who both co-created the unconventional dungeon-crawler game Fungeon Party. As with any form of entertainment, triumph is often accompanied by tragedy - which is why your investors demand that you take every precaution (and ensure every visitor signs the safety waiver) before you show them the wonders of Dinosaur World! So, this one may be a bit of a stretch as Tales from the Loop is mostly about big lumbering robots. But there are dinosaurs in there too! The base game has a few event cards and tasks that are all about the characters stumbling upon these wild dinos on their travels. An expansion for the game adds a whole story based around these wily lizards. I don’t want to give too much away as discovering the story is part of the fun. Thanks to advances in science and technology, resurrecting dinosaurs is now a piece of cake, and crowds of tourists are enjoying the wonders of dino amusements around the world. As ambitious park developers, players in the upcoming board game Dinosaur World dream of building and running their own prehistoric attractions, as long as the visitors stay undigested long enough for the park to remain open. I was talking to my buddy Kev about games our review crew was going to play in the month of March. I like to mix the review copies I get from Meeple Mountain with games from our group’s personal collection, because it’s not always possible to get a review copy of new games from our publishing partners.

Sorry. Had to pause and talk dice. But if you’ve played any of the Dinoverse games, you know I’m right!

These are the questions I ask, but I get that for some people, roll-and-write games are not for them. Some players can also hurdle the challenge of getting a big game to a big table with ease; in that case, I think Dinosaur World is going to fit best. Now that the scientific triumph of Dinosaur cloning is public knowledge, competition is hot and new parks spring up regularly. Though many of these amateurs are opening their gates before everything has been safety-tested, there’s no shortage of patrons eager to be entertained by extinct behemoths! With DNA to collect, dinosaurs to create, buildings to construct, workers to hire and enclosures to admire, the two to four players participating will have their work cut out for them in Dinosaur World.

Jeeple Tour – Plan your Jeeple’s route to score the most excitement and/or most potential tourist deaths Dinosaur World has 17 different types of dino meeples (the deluxe version that I’m using for review does, anyway; the retail version just uses a single type of green wooden dino-meeple to represent all the herbivores in the game). In many ways, that’s cool. Or, it’s cool until someone says, Let’s confirm this much: if you have Dinosaur Island, I think Dinosaur World is the better game and I’d replace Dinosaur Island with Dinosaur World if I had all the money in the world. If you don’t have any of the Dinoverse games, you are looking for an excellent Jurassic Park simulator AND you have a large table and the time to regularly get in a 2-hour experience, Dinosaur World is an excellent choice. Each round, you’ll draft a group of Workers from the Worker Database to run your park for a full season. Then you’ll divide up those Workers to take on the various tasks of building and running your Park - gathering ancient DNA, cloning new Dinos, buying new attractions, and keeping your patrons safe from a toothy demise. The better you run your park, the more Victory Points you’ll score! Once players have finished the construction of their parks, they’re then free to improve them wherever they see fit, attracting even more visitors and wowing their guests with exciting new exhibits. Most importantly, players will have to ensure the safety of their visitors, as they will lose points if too many of their guests are tragically eaten by dinosaurs.Once you’ve finished drafting dice and tiles, and taking private actions on your player board , you’ll run your tour, scoring points, cash, and/or excitement along the way. This creates a number of problems. You need to be in a well-lit room. You need to not be 47 years old and suffering from near-blindness. (Maybe that’s just my problem.) You need to NOT play this at a bar or game cafe that doesn’t have large tables. This is a tight game on a 6-foot long, 3-foot wide table, as noted previously. At one friend’s house, Dinosaur World required a small poker table on the side to hold all the stuff. This expansion comes with 3 new dinosaurs that are a hybrid of different types: Galliraptor (herbivore Gallimimus & small carnivore Raptor), Tyrannaceratops (herbivore Triceratops & large carnivore T-Rex), and Velocidon (small carnivore Velociraptor & large canivore Pteranodon). Dinosaur World simplifies many steps that I thought were a bit of a stumble in Dinosaur Island. In Dinosaur World, round steps are easy to teach but thinky, especially as you plan out how to run your “Jeeple” (the game’s term for your wooden Jeep playing piece) on a tour of your personal theme park. Before that, you’ll take steps that are quite easy. Like its predecessors, Dinosaur World puts players in the shoes of burgeoning entrepreneurs aiming to build the best dino theme park over a 5-round experience.

At a high level though, you play as a bunch of kids who are going to a school near an experimental particle accelerator called The Loop. Strange things keep happening and the kids all get curious and decide to investigate. You have a story to play through, but you also need to do all those kid things like homework and taking the dog for a walk. If you neglect this stuff you may get grounded. That means you can’t go out and investigate and things start slipping by. There are definitely a few rough edges with Tales from the Loop. There were a few moments when it felt like a rule was missing. But if you can see past that and really get into the exploration of the fantastic setting, you’re going to have a good time. Now with dinosaurs! Dinosaur World is a worker placement, tile placement dinosaur theme park building game four two to four players. Games can take between 60 to 120 minutes, with higher player counts taking longer until all involved have had experience with the game. The central playing area. I will warn you now, this game can be a table hog!

Jurassic Park, Streamlined (Sorta)

I was torn between this one or Dinosaur Island Rawr ‘n’ Write, but as I’ve already mentioned the big version of that, I figured I’d pop this underappreciated gem on the list instead. This is a great little roll and write that has you building up a dinosaur park. That is definitely a popular theme here, Jurassic Park has a lot to answer for! Anyways, with Dino World you’re building up a dino park with some randomised facilities to give you different scoring conditions each time you play. You’ve also got a different set of research cards which give you access to those sort of ‘re-roll a die’ powers you get in roll and write games. Excitement scores players cash to spend the next round. Five rounds later, the game is over. Tally up those scores, subtract points for any dead guests (yes, this will happen), and declare one player the winner! I mean, look at all of this! The Big Negative? The Bigness Jurassic Park was an amazing movie and ahead of its time (watch the Netflix show on it if you do not believe me) I liked Dinosaur World. I definitely prefer it to Dinosaur Island. The randomness of the hooligans has been removed (replaced with the randomness of dice at dinosaur exhibits, but I preferred this mechanic) and the park building aspect was placed center stage, a theme that has more relevance to me. Building the parks is very enjoyable, as are the decisions of when and how to use your workers. I only wish the Jeeple Tour was a bit more robust. Overall, I recommend this game, especially if dinosaurs or theme parks are your thing!

These tokens can be removed by sending workers to clean them during the Jeeple Tour phase. The algae collected can then be exchanged for DNA, the precious resource used to make the dinosaurs. This new mechanic works nicely with the base game and really drives the theme home, as it fits perfectly with the aquatic dinosaurs. The triumph of science that led to dinosaurs returning to the world once more has become public knowledge. New parks spring up regularly, often beginning operations even before everything has been finalized. There is no shortage of patrons eager to be entertained by these returned species in new and exciting ways. However, as with any form of entertainment, elements of triumph are often accompanied by elements of tragedy. This means it is of the utmost importance that you take every precaution by ensuring each visitor signs the safety waiver before enjoying the wonders of Dinosaur World!

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In addition to these awesome components, this expansion adds some alternate rules to play with. At the beginning of the game, players will draft these aquatic dinos instead of the standard set of dinos. These tiles have special end-game scoring rules on them, steering your strategy in different directions. Examples of the three dinosaur types, from left to right: Herbivores, Small Carnivores, Hard Carnivores.