Dinosaur Island Review – Slap Bands and Boring Board Game Chores

Dinosaur Island exploded on Kickstarter. It was one of the first games to truly offer a premium experience. Metal coins, plastic dinosaurs, dual-layered cardboard player mats, and a slap band! Before this game, we were ecstatic when Agricola included wooden sheep.

Once you finish ogling the components, you’ll find a lot is going on in Dinosaur Island. Each round takes place over four phases and a clean-up.

Beginning with the Research Phase, where you roll two handfuls of chunky dice, and draft the outcomes. The drafting is done with your three scientists, who are levelled from one to three. You place a scientist next to a die and multiply the rewards by the scientist’s level. Through this draft, you can get DNA, collect dinosaur recipes, or upgrade your DNA storage.

While in the Market Phase, you turn your money into improvements for your park. Building attractions, upgrading your laboratory, hiring specialists, and if worse comes worst you can buy additional DNA.

Next is the Worker Phase. Here you put your staff to work by placing them in different action spaces on your player board. Actions include mixing DNA, creating new dinosaurs, and increasing the security of the park.

Now all the behind-the-scenes work is done, visitors can now tour your park. It’s here, all of it comes together in the Park Phase.

Visitors line up to enter your park based on how much excitement you’ve generated through dinosaurs and attractions. These all count as victory points, but only if you have the capacity for them in your attractions. Oh, and they don’t get eaten.

In the event your dinosaurs create more threats than you have security systems, they take over the park. Gobbling up visitors and your victory points along with them.

Once this Park Concludes, then it’s onto cleanup and the round. You continue through these many, many phases until all but one of the randomly drawn objectives are complete.

Where’s the excitement?

Dinosaur Island fails the impossible task of being as exciting as what it’s themed after. The fact we have six Jurassic Park movies, while only two of them are sitting above 54% on Rotten Tomatoes, speaks volumes about the popularity and excitement of dinosaurs.

Yet in Dinosaur Island, these magnificent creatures are relegated to being just bigger attractions. By that I mean, they have no personality or anything that makes one stand out from the other. Compare this treatment to animals in Ark Nova, where each animal has a special ability and feels unique, and it’s nothing short of disappointing.

When you hear a game called Dinosaur Island, your brain fills with exciting possibilities of what it could be. But here, it’s a rather ordinary eurogame. Where the theme could be replaced with any number of different park management scenarios, without the designers missing a beat.

Outside of the theme though, the game is overwrought with unnecessary complexity. The five phases of each round don’t add up to a cohesive whole.

Each phase introduces a new mechanic. Whether it’s drafting, resource management, or worker placement, you’re always doing something new. Therefore, it’s hard to connect what you’re doing in one phase to the next. Meaning, that you’re more focused on working within the boundaries of each phase than putting together an interesting strategy.

This makes Dinosaur Island an incredibly wide and varied board game. But a shallow one.

A game of inches

There are a couple of bright lights within Dinosaur Island. For example, the DNA system is fun to interact with. There are three types of basic DNA and three types of advanced DNA. You have to mix, match, and combine to create the specific DNA types for dinosaur recipes.

Compared to the rest of the game, this DNA management is tight and streamlined. Making the puzzle to figure out the best way to use your DNA is an interesting challenge.

There are also the end-game objectives, that keep the game fresh after a couple of plays. Coming in three different flavours, short, medium, and long they allow you to customize how you want to play. Although, in short games, you barely have time to finish your first dinosaur.

But that’s all there is.

Outside of these highlights, Dinosaur Island feels like a game of chores. Where the pace is slow, and the work you put in isn’t rewarded well enough to keep you engaged. Like when you manage to put together some coin to hire specialists, and their benefits give one extra visitor or increase your security by one per round. It’s not worth the trouble.

The reverse of this is also true. For example, when T-Rex breaks loose running among your visitors. Your park isn’t shut down, heck, you don’t even make the news. You only lose a few points, and still attract visitors in the next round.

It feels like no matter what you do your park is never affected too badly by how it’s run. This keeps scores close throughout the game but doesn’t feel as exciting or interactive as something like Argent the Consortium.

Beautiful but flawed

In terms of publishing, Pandasaurus set a new benchmark with Dinosaur Island. With artwork from Kwanchai Moriya, it’s still one of the best-looking, and best-produced board games on the market.

However, I’m hung up on how much the theme mismatches the mechanics of the game. A theme that evokes excitement just by looking at the box, and using your imagination. It never stood a chance of meeting those expectations, but it misses the mark so badly that it sucks my excitement to play right out of the air like some sort of vampire.

But even when you put the theme aside. Dinosaur Island is a remix of mechanics we’ve seen in other board games before. Except, it doesn’t improve on any of these mechanics it’s borrowing.

Quite the opposite.

A large number of phases and rules add complexity for complexity’s sake. This increases game time, and slows the pace of the game, while not adding any scope for strategy. Compared to Endless Winter: Paleoamericans which follows a similar design philosophy, but nails it. It’s hard to recommend Dinosaur Island when there are other games out there doing the same thing – but better.