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. Dinosaur World is a worker placement, tile placement dinosaur theme park building game four two to four players. Games can take between 60 to 120 minutes, with higher player counts taking longer until all involved have had experience with the game. The central playing area. I will warn you now, this game can be a table hog!

As a free action (no die required) a player can select a research ability which allows the player to adjust a die by one. The die is not physically changed as all players use the same dice pool. The value of the die can be increased beyond six allowing players to build the bigger dinosaur pens, without having to combine multiple die. Sorry. Had to pause and talk dice. But if you’ve played any of the Dinoverse games, you know I’m right!Excitement scores players cash to spend the next round. Five rounds later, the game is over. Tally up those scores, subtract points for any dead guests (yes, this will happen), and declare one player the winner! I mean, look at all of this! The Big Negative? The Bigness 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? 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. 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, 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.

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. My only two other issues, which are both player count specific, is that at three or four players, the game can overstay its welcome, especially if you have AP prone players. In addition, anything beyond two players and the game is really a table hog. I enjoyed the game the most with at players. Final Thoughts:In danger mode there are three research lab action cards that are available. These are sorted in two three groups – Z, Y and Z – and one from each group is revealed at the beginning of the game. These offer game changing abilities and powers that can be actioned like the research ability in the lite mode. You can use the X, Y and Z research actions three, two and one time(s) through the game respectively. 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 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). 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.

Welcome to Dino World is a roll and write where players are competing to build the best dinosaur park. Players use dice to build special buildings, power generators and build dinosaur pens, draw paths to connect to the park’s entrance and attempt to stop dinosaurs attempting to escape. Players are also competing for visitor cards (aka objectives) and being the first to claim them means that you can deny your opponents from getting them. 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. 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. Depending on the danger level certain generators might malfunction. If they malfunction, then a part of the dino pen is damaged. If all the squares in a pen are damaged, then the dino escapes and causes additional damage to adjacent pens. Final Thoughts on Welcome to Dino WorldThese are the questions I ask, but I get that for some people, roll-and-write games are not for them. Some players can also hurdle the challenge of getting a big game to a big table with ease; in that case, I think Dinosaur World is going to fit best.