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. 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! 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. 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! The shape of the path will be determined by the pip value of the die. A player can draw multiple paths as a single action if the total value of the paths does not exceed the pip value of the die.

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 game comes with two different modes. A lite and a danger mode. The danger mode offers additional rules and is a more complex game. The lite mode is a lighter affair but still on the complex side when compared to most other roll and writes. Gameplay 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! 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. 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.

Price

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, 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. As far as roll and writes go I would say Welcome to Dino World is on the meatier side of the genre. It is not a complex game but offers more than the average roll and write. It is a refreshing change to have a game in this genre, a roll and write with more than just crossing a coloured box (not that there is anything wrong with these, time and a place). That’s too long for a solo game. As a parent, I approach the gaming experience more and more from an accessibility mindset: what game is the easiest one to get to the table? Which game offers nice, crunchy decisions with a setup, play and teardown time in under an hour? What gives me chances at near infinite replayability? Which one will my wife play with me more consistently?

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. TheJeepleTour stage injects a dose of reality into the gameand alsopresents a charming logistical puzzle. As you start each tour from the Welcome Centre tile, playersmustconsider wheretheyplace attractions to keep them accessible. As new tileshave to be connected on at least one side, there is a huge amount of freedom in how you build your park. At the end of round three, the Welcome Centre tile will move three spaces away and become the Park Entrance. This means youhave tothink carefully about where to put your attractions so that you can still get to them later in the game. Bored To Extinction So, we did. And I’m glad we did. Dinosaur World is great and builds on many of the same ideas that were successful in the other 2 main games in the “Dinoverse”, the name of the collective Pandasaurus universe of dino-games: Dinosaur Island, Dinosaur Island Rawr ‘n Write, and Dinosaur World.The power generators also behave slightly differently. You can add a total of eight generators (rather than 12) and each generator produces four megawatts of energy to an adjacent pen. So, one generator might supply four pens or supply one pen four times. Every time you build a new pen you also increase your threat level depending on the dino drawn. A herbivore will increase the threat by one and a carnivore will increase your threat by two. Examples of the three dinosaur types, from left to right: Herbivores, Small Carnivores, Hard Carnivores.

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). 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. Jurassic Park was an amazing movie and ahead of its time (watch the Netflix show on it if you do not believe me) 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.If this can be believed, the biggest takeaway from Dinosaur World is its size. I have a Game Topper for my game room (3 feet wide by 6 feet long) and it is normally enough for any game I play. 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. 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. Jeeple Tour – Plan your Jeeple’s route to score the most excitement and/or most potential tourist deaths