The rest of the time, though, Dinosaur Island is cutesy, vibrant, and a serviceable worker placement game, but also about as fragmentary as Othniel Charles Marsh’s original apatosaurus skeleton.Įven running a dino park, you’ll spend a number of minutes staring at a market offer.ĭinosaur Island is divided between four parts, each portion important to the overall picture of what the game is trying to accomplish, but none so crucial that they couldn’t have been tightened. This is when people get eaten, a few points are lost, and park owners must scramble to extricate themselves from the elbow-deep triceratops dung they’ve buried themselves beneath. When you neglect one aspect of your park - usually security, though it can also be attractions, food courts, or just a revenue stream - the problems ripple outward from that focal point like a hurricane tearing Florida a brand new rump-end because a butterfly flapped its uppity wings in Brazil. This is the best thing about Dinosaur Island.
DINOSAUR ISLAND RULES HOW TO
The following quarter, the park reopens to hearty acclaim, a new batch of eager-beaver guests flooding through those front gates, apparently the same people who aren’t sure how to tune into the coverage of last month’s carnage. Meanwhile, your customers in the other portions of the park go about the very important business of buying tickets, hats with terrible puns for logos, and ride passes. Some folks are eaten, probably the slowest and dumbest of them, because baby, this is natural selection.įor losing customers, you lose victory points, at the very sensible ratio of one customer to one point. When the customers pour into the park, hungry-eyed at the prospect of glimpsing these winged marvels, the electrified caging around the exhibit shorts, then buckles, then tears to shreds. Your staff have recently cooked up something special - some pteranodons, perhaps - but budget cuts precluded the necessary safety checks on the aviary perimeter.
Surely that will work.Įvery so often, Dinosaur Island approaches the fullness of what it could have been.