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

Product Information

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,

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. 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! 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 in Dinosaur World, you draft a new resume card to acquire new workers; spend workers to take public actions building your park and acquiring DNA; spend further workers to take private actions improving that park; then drive your jeep around experiencing the wonder and excitement of what you have built! Throughout the game you acquire victory points through a variety of means — and possibly a few visitor deaths as a natural consequence of overly enthusiastic dinosaur encounters. At the end of the game, you lose points if you accumulated too many deaths, then the player with the most points wins! I had been intrigued by Dinosaur World, from Pandasaurus Games ( Wild Space, That Time You Killed Me, and of course the many other games/expansions in the Dinosaur Island space), but didn’t have the cash to shell out for another round of dinosaurs.

You might face some visitor deaths along the way, but don’t worry - as long as your park is “safer” than your competitors’, it won’t hurt your score! 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. 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, here’s one set of stuff that is NOT in Dinosaur World: Specialist cards, which were so good in the previous Dinoverse games (although they are here in the solo game, strangely). I like that getting specialized workers has been streamlined here. I need someone better at making me money? I need green meeples. That’s great. But the Specialists are so good and add so much variety to every playthrough. 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.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!