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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This expansion comes with 6 new dinosaurs species (18 meeples and 6 tiles total!) that add some aquatic variety to your games! All dinos will have heat transfer artwork on both sides of the blue translucent plastic meeple. Which of the dinos is your favorite: Dunkleosteus, Elasmosaurus, Kronosaurus, Mosasaurus, Plesiosasurus, or Plotosaurus? 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. 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. 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! 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.

Dinosaur World is a lot of fun, but it is much more likely that I pull down Dinosaur Island: Rawr ‘n Write to play because it’s so much easier to set up and play right away. The scientists in Dinosaur World never thought to ask if they should. They have decided to tinker with nature itself by combining the DNA of different dinosaurs to create brand new species never seen before. 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.

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And this is where Dinosaur World breaks away from the other two Dinoverse games: it’s a tile-and-route-building game, and the variability comes in many forms thanks to three public goal/milestone cards each player is working towards. This also enlarges the game’s footprint considerably, as players place hexagonal tiles from their player board’s Welcome Center to build a considerable tableau across a table. These new dinos grant higher victory point levels, but it comes with increased threat as well. However, their dual types are quite versatile, as they can satisfy the various objectives and tiles seen in the game! 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 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.

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. 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. Dinosaur World barely accommodates 4 players thanks to all of the tile laying you will do during play. This massive table hog left me in the place I expected: as fun as Dinosaur World is, it is not my favorite game in the series thanks to the Tyrannosaurus-sized footprint. This is especially true when you consider solo play. I only played Dinosaur World once solo for this review, and that was enough to confirm what I already guessed: Dinosaur Island Rawr ‘n Write is simply the better game for a single player, mainly because there is no setup/teardown time. You can get all of that Dinoverse magic in about 20 minutes. It took me about 75 minutes to set up, play solo, and put away Dinosaur World. 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.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! 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. 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.