Dinosaur Island
by Jonathan Gilmour and Brian Lewis
Dinosaur Island at its core is a worker placement game where players manage their own . . . you guessed it . . dinosaur theme park. Players attempt to build and improve their theme park by collecting and managing Dino-DNA which is used to improve their parks attractions. While managing and improving their parks, players are tasked with providing security to keep visitors inside the park safe. And on several levels it’s clever, well designed, immersive and fun.
Gameplay is fun and intuitive. Players are led through their turns by central tableaux that are organized by game phases. Players assign their scientists to different tasks. Some tasks require a more skilled scientist. Each scientist is assigned a different skill level, so assigning a level 3 scientist to collect DNA ensures that you are getting three times as much DNA. Not just clever, its dino-clever!
Players manage the business side of their park on a tableaux that tracks available DNA, security / threat levels, and worker skills.
As players brings more visitors to the park to see increasingly dangerous dinosaurs threat levels rise. Not keeping pace with security causes visitors to be eaten. Players draw randomly from a meeple-patron bag which mostly includes regular visitors. some of the visitors are ‘hooligans’ who are in the park to cause trouble. These hooligans are placed first and in the case of a visitor being eaten, hooligans are removed last. Players build and improve their theme parks on a grid tableaux; adding various attractions and services for visitors to the park.
The 80’s themed colors and graphics are well thought out and add a sense of nostalgia to the game. Giving the impression that both Gilmour and Lewis had fun designing the game.
Dinosaur Island is a solid and fun game. It’s well designed and clever. Though there are plenty of options to choose from during gameplay, player turns are fun and don’t suffer from analysis paralysis. However, players are limited in their interactions with other players during gameplay by only occasionally getting in each others way. Beyond that one issue I wouldn’t hesitate to add it to any game collection. It’s totally rad!