Welcome to Jurassic Park Dinosaur Island!

• Runtime: 90-120 Minutes
• Players: 1-4
• Mechanics: Set collection, worker placement, resource management, tile placement, drafting

In Dinosaur Island, you get to channel John Hammond and play the owner of a Jurassic Park-like theme park. The Goal: Get visitors to your park by opening attractions and cloning dinosaurs. (Just be careful because those visitors might get eaten…)

Here’s all the cool, science-y themed stuff you get to do:

• Phase 1: Research – Collect DNA, increase cold storage, collect dinosaur attractions, and hire additional scientists.
• Phase 2: Market – Upgrade research abilities, and purchase attractions and specialists.
• Phase 3: Worker – Create dinosaurs, upgrade you dinosaur paddocks, increase your security, enhance your DNA science, and collect some money if you need it.
• Phase 4: Park – Visitors pay to enter your park. (Watch out! There are some pesky hooligans sneaking in for free by jumping the line.) Also, if your security is not tight enough, your dinosaurs will eat your paying customers.
• Phase 5: Cleanup – Clean up and reset for Phase 1 of the next round.

The goal is to complete Objectives and make Dinosaurs (with science!) to score Victory Points. The player with the most Victory Points at the end wins.

Here’s what we loved about Dinosaur Island:

• The component design was well executed and immersive. We really like how they thought of every aspect of the park such as visitors, security, collecting park profit, and research investments to developing your dinosaur collection. Let’s just say we really got into building our own Dinosaur theme parks.

• The custom meeples were a great touch and fit the game nicely. We also liked the color coding for distinguishing paid customers and hooligans but most importantly we LOVED the dinosaur shaped meeples.

• The turn structure was well-managed. During our first round, it was a little daunting with all the choices that could be made and the moving parts going on at once. After a round or two, play moved smoothly from phase to phase.

• Even with all the things going on each turn, play didn’t bog down. None of us felt like we were waiting forever to make our next move. Although this may require a disciplined group who can cooperate with a bit of solo play and the reconvening to understand other players’ actions.

• The different dinosaurs, DNA, scientists, and upgrades were all great. The options were plentiful and exciting and we couldn’t wait to use our actions. We were happy when we had a bunch of different types of dinosaurs in our paddocks.

• The bit of randomness and racing in the beginning phases was a fun little interaction between players. Especially when you’re drawing from the bag of meeples (“please no hooligans, please no hooligans, please no hooligans”)

• The overall concept was really fun. We love that we can do a bit of science and mix the right DNA to make new dinosaurs. Once we open the park to the public, we have to make sure that our “pet” dinos don’t eat too many people — just the right amount of silly for our taste. Bonus: the experience was definitely elevated with Jurassic Park soundtrack music playing in the background. We highly recommend those tunes for this game. Trust us.

Downsides to Dinosaur Island

• The setup and rules were a bit complicated, and it took us a while to get the board setup and learn the game the first time. In fact, we would never have made it through without the help of Rodney Smith’s fabulous Watch It Played video. (Thanks, Rodney, you are a gentleman and a scholar!)

• Planning out the next turn was not readily apparent due to the size of the board and everything that was going on.

• There was not a lot of player interaction. While this was not necessarily a bad thing, most of us prefer at least some direct player interaction (no offense to you strict-Euro fans out there).

• The random draw for visitors made for a few moments when players who were already behind fell even further behind because they drew a bunch of line cutting hooligans. This was the only real “feel bad” in the game.

Overall gut-feeling

This is an excellent game! We LOVE the theme. We will no doubt play it many more times with the accompanying music. The mechanics are well executed, and after a small learning curve, the game feels quick even though it actually takes a couple of hours. We had a lot of fun making dinosaurs, expanding our paddocks, and making some awesome theme parks. I mean, who DOESN’T want to run their own Jurassic Park and grow their very own T-Rex?!

Dinosaur Island gets an XYZ Game Labs BGBC 8 out of 10.