I Really Wanted to Love Dinosaur World

Welcome to this week’s gaming post! This week I’m discussing one of my least favorite plays I’ve had in a while. So without further ado, let’s jump into the recent highlights.

A couple weeks ago, I played a four-person game of Dinosaur World, a sequel of sorts to Dinosaur Island, for the first time. I never tried Dinosaur Island, but in Dinosaur World, players are competing to build the most exciting dinosaur theme park – think Jurassic Park board game version. The theme alone was enough to get me excited about the game; however, I was in for some major disappointment.

My biggest issue with the design is how punishing the threat mechanism feels in the game. Threat is generated when you build dinosaurs and activate certain buildings, with more aggressive dinosaurs (T-Rex) causing more threat than herbivories (Stegosaurus). At the end of each round, players compare their security level to the amount of threat they’ve generated, and each player then has to take death tokens to make up the difference between the two. Thematically this makes sense, and it creates a balancing act where you have to manage how much threat and security you’re generating. However, what I found is that if your security falls behind your threat early in the game, there’s very little you can do to catch up. The closest comparison I can make is to Suburbia where you have to increase your income to match your population growth. 

In our recent game of Dinosaur World, there was a public objective to generate four deaths in a single round, and I thought to myself, okay that’s an easy one to get off the bat. In hindsight, I was probably naïve to go for this on the first turn in combination with two special attractions that generated threat each time I activated them because it led to a downward spiral that continued throughout the entire game. I was never able to generate enough security to catch up, even though I maxed out the three security actions for at least the last three turns. I think I would have found this balancing act more enjoyable if there were more ways to generate security or counteract deaths throughout the game.

One of the most interesting mechanisms is how deaths are handled at the end of the game. Whichever player has the fewest deaths discards all of their tokens, and then all of the other players discard that same number of deaths. Then each player’s remaining deaths counts for negative victory points with it scaling the higher in death numbers you go. Going back to my recent game, two of us had over double the number of deaths than the other two players, and at the end of the game, we each lost more than half the number of victory points we had. The most frustrating part of this was realizing this was going to happen about halfway through the game but feeling like there was no way to stop the derailed train. It got to the point where I realized that each threat I generated was going to be worth minus three victory points (the max) at the end of the game, but not feeling like there were any other strategies for me to generate victory points other than to keep making more dinosaurs and activating my dinosaur special attractions.

This is compounded by the fact that the game took incredibly long to finish. Our four person game with setup and teach easily took at least three and half hours to finish. So the back half of the game felt like I was going through the motions, especially as I realized there was no way for me to dig myself out of my early-game mistake. Also, for a game all about running a dinosaur theme park, I want to be rewarded for building a lot of dinosaurs and not have it feel so punishing.

For a heavy euro, there’s a fair amount of luck and very little mitigation for it. One example is the worker cards that players draft at the beginning of each round. Players use these workers to perform all of their actions for the entire round, with some actions requiring a certain color worker to activate. If you get unlucky and there’s no card available with the specific workers you need, or if someone else takes the one you need, then tough luck. I would have loved a way where you could either trade two workers to get one worker of your choice or have to spend a certain amount of money to get an extra worker.

Another example is the dinosaur dice that you roll whenever you activate a dinosaur attraction. These dice determine if that player has to take extra death tokens. It’s exciting that there are higher odds of rolling deaths on the carnivore die than the herbivore one; however, these also create big luck swings that I don’t find enjoyable in such a long and heavy euro game. For example, say I get unlucky and have to take two death tokens, but another player gets lucky and doesn’t take any. This can have up to a six-point victory point swing just for one die. Compound this with the number of dice you roll over the course of the game and it can easily be the difference between someone winning and losing. I don’t want a few dice rolls to determine who wins and loses a three plus hour heavy euro.

While the production quality is pretty solid (e.g., dual layer boards, plastic dinosaur figures), I can’t get over the fact that the icons are way too small. I’d like to think I have pretty good eyesight, but trying to read the icons and text on the tiles was like reading mouse print unless they were right in front of you. I know the artists likely wanted the buildings on the tiles to be visible, but I’d easily have traded smaller building art to make the icons bigger to be more visible from a distance.  

Finally, with such an interesting theme, I wish there was more player interaction besides someone happening to take the tile I want and keeping track of other players death tokens. For the majority of our three plus hour game, I was mostly heads down doing my own thing. I also don’t really enjoy games where I have to plan out my entire round at the beginning of the round, and in this game you really have to sort out how many workers and of which colors, as well as the resources you’ll need.

I apologize if this seems like an overly critical post on the game, and it may have just been a very poor first impression. However, outside of the compelling theme, there aren’t enough positives about the game to pull me back to Dinosaur World anytime soon.

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s gaming highlights! I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned, future content, or format in the comments section below. Happy gaming!

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