Dinosaur Island

Jan Solostar7,8

Excelente juego en el que gestionar un parque a lo Jurassic Park. Estilo retro-chillón arriesgado para un buen eurogame donde el recurso principal será el ADN de dinosaurio.

EvEvanstar4,6

This game has a lot going for it. It's essentially a engine building game, where you spend scientists to take DNA or dinosaur recipes, then upgrade your worker placement board with new and better action spots and/or build spots in your park to hold visitors, then use your limited supply of workers to activate the abilities on your personal action board to help you make new dinosaurs by spending DNA or increase security to make sure the dinosaurs don't get out and eat your guests. If your threat level exceeds your security, then a few of the visitors that come to your park die, but in game terms this is only a -1VP penalty per eaten customer, so not a huge deal. The game varies itself by having three randomly drawn game modifying rule cards each game which is a nice idea. I love the components. The cute dino meeples that came with the deluxe are a delight. I will say the 80s tastic font they used in the rulebook was not a delight and was hard on my eyes to read. Overall good, although the game has two problems. Problem one is that turn order is decided by who has the most VP. If you get a minor lead, then you wind up going last until someone overtakes you, and there's not much reason to do that when being first in turn order gets you first pick of all the new stuff that rolls or flips at the start of the turn. This can be controlled by building visitor spots that generate money instead of points, but this is still an akward, although not deal breaking mechanism. The deal breaking mechanism is how you get visitors. Once you are in the visitors phase, you draw meeples out of the bag equal to your parks "excitement level" which is driven by how many dinosaurs you have. The bag is full of some combination of paying customers worth VP, and non-paying meeples worth nothing. You've spent your turns and game so far making sure you get plenty of bag pulls and that you have enough room in your park to store all the guys you drew, and then maybe some large percentage of meeples you draw just don't produce for you at some random point in the game. Why? Who is this mechanism fun for? Is it to randomly hit someone doing well so that other players can catch up with their engine? If so, this pull luck can just as easily hit someone behind in VP. In our game we saw one card that mitigated the pull luck, and that was it. I looked at some of the other rules variation cards, and one adds a third color of meeple to the bag that are worth even more VP, so really just serving to ramp up this aspect of the otherwise fairly low luck game. If not for this mechanism I think this would have been a keeper for me. Really a pity because this game really had everything going for it. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★★☆☆ Raw enjoyment

GaGarfieldstar7,0

#44 Wow, a thematic worker placement. But I wish I could do more with my park. [c] Theme: ★★★★☆ <!-- size 7]Strong theme for a worker placement game... --> Gameplay: ★★★☆☆ <!-- size 7]Good variety of decisions --> Interaction: ☆☆☆☆☆ <!-- size 7]Almost no interaction --> Artwork: ★★★☆☆ <!-- size 7]Ok, maybe a little bit too colorful --> Luck: ★☆☆☆☆ <!-- size 7]Only the drawing of visitors --> Strategy: ★★★☆☆ <!-- size 7]I think everyone has the same I guess... --> Components: ★★★★☆ <!-- size 7]Custom dice, little dinos, cardboards with dimples(?) --> Play duration: ★★★☆☆ <!-- size 7]Ok --> Easy to teach: ★★☆☆☆ <!-- size 7]Sosolala --> Setup time: ★★★☆☆ <!-- size 7]Ok --> No downtime: ★★★★☆ <!-- size 7]Should be playable quite fast --> [/c]