25th May 2021 (Online)

As the “Feature Game” was to be the “Roar and Write” game, Welcome to Dino World the evening began with a competition to see who could do the best T-Rex impersonation. Voting was carried out using the Vevox utility and the winner with 83% of the vote, thanks to his truly remarkable rendition of “Bang a Gong (Get it on)”, was Beige. It was only fitting really, given his obvious disappointment a month ago when the game was postponed. The reason for the competition was to choose who would roll the dice, because this is a game which is all about the dice and planning what to do with them.

– Image by boardGOATS

Welcome to Dino World is completely unrelated to the Welcome to… games we have played previously, except for the similarity in the names of course. There are two levels, but as we hadn’t played it before, we played the “Lite Mode” and saved “Danger Mode” for another day, thus reducing the risk of there being another Isla Nublar type incident in Oxfordshire. The basic idea of both modes though, is that a player (in this case Beige) rolls three dice and everyone spends these to take a maximum of three actions (one per die). The unusual aspect of the game is that dice can be combined together to increase their value, so, for example a roll of one, three and four could be used separately to carry out relatively low value actions, or combined together for one larger move.

– Image by boardGOATS

There are three possible actions: Build a Facility, Build Path and build a Dinosaur Pen. There are two types of Facility, Recreation and Welfare. Recreation requires a die of value one, two or three while Welfare requires a four, five or six. Thus, with the example roll above, a player could choose to build two Recreation Facilities and one Welfare Facility, or the might choose to combine the one and three do build two Welfare facilities. Similarly, building Paths has a pip cost, so a die with value four, for example, could be used to build four straight or corner sections, two T-junctions or convert one straight into a crossroads.

– Image by boardGOATS

The guts of the game is building dinosaur pens, however. There are six different types from the small herbivorous protoceratops to the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex. Each has a different die requirement and takes up a different amount of space in the player park, and some also need power to maintain their security. Power comes from generators, which will supply up to four orthogonally adjacent pens. They are free to build, but players can only build a maximum of twelve over all eight rounds, and unused generators are worth two points, so efficiency is the name of the game.

– Image by boardGOATS

The driving force of the game are the Visitors though, which are goal cards that vary from game to game. In the conventional version of the game, these are dealt out between players, such that people who are sitting next to each other share them: the first player to achieve the goal gets the points and the other player loses out. This clearly makes the game much more interactive and competitive, but this simply wasn’t possible while playing online. So, we used the “10+ Players Variant” where the Visitors are drawn from a deck and treated as end-game communal objectives.

– Image by boardGOATS

This time, the Visitor cards gave points for:

≥3 Power Generators touching;
Connecting both entrances with a path;
≥1 Tyrannosaurus Rex pen and ≥1 brachiosaurus pen
≥3 Pens that are all containing herbivore or carnivore including two different types;
≥5 Pens containing a mixture of protoceratops and composognathus;
Completely surrounding the Lake with Pens, Facilities and a maximum of two paths.

– Image by boardGOATS

There is additional variety introduced into the game with the Facility cards. This time we played with the Picnic Area and the Hatchery. The Picnic Area gave points when next to the lake and the Hatchery gave points for each pen it was next to. The game is played over eight rounds with the players scoring points for the dinosaurs they have in their park, the Facilities they have built, the number of visitors they have claimed and economy in building Electricity generators.

– Image by boardGOATS

The first thing that everyone discovered was how bad they were at drawing dinosaurs. We had lots of woodlice, a few tadpoles, a chicken, and some fortune cookies with legs. The next thing everyone found out was that Blue was right when she said the first few rounds were very slow as people needed to spend a lot of time planning, but the later rounds were quicker as players just had to decide how to execute those plans. There were a lot of high value rolls in the first few rounds, in fact, there was at least one five in each of the first five rounds.

– Image by boardGOATS

The high values were very useful as players could build a lot of path or some big dinosaur pens, but Beige decided he didn’t trust the dice and swapped them for a different set. Although the game was without the blood and guts of Jurassic Park, everyone enjoyed it and found it offered something a little different to some of the other “Roll and Write” games we’ve played. The scores were fairly well spread, but both Pink and Green thought their scores which were over a hundred were enough until Ivory gave his score of a hundred and seventeen. He thought he’d got it too until Blue’s score of a hundred and twenty had been double checked and confirmed.

– Image by boardGOATS

As people double-checked their scores and compared notes, we also discussed how different the “Danger Mode” was and how this more advanced version sounded a lot like a “Roar and Write” version of Dinosaur Island, a game we played over two years ago. As the evening was roaring on, we decided to move on to Board Game Arena, and with relatively few people, we were able to play Downforce, the game we played in December at our online New Year Party (as the closest we could come up with to replace our annual game of PitchCar).

– Image by boardGOATS

The track was picked at random on both occasions, but by chance we used the River Station track both times. It was when everything was set up that we realised we couldn’t really remember how to play, so had to muddle through. In practice, the game is quite straight-forward, but it is a lot easier when you know the rules. The idea is that players are dealt movement cards and then bid for a car. Each player gets one car, and the idea is that players try to win a car they have movement cards for. Players then take it in turns to play cards and move cars.

– Adapted by boardGOATS
from image by BGG contributor The Innocent

There are two key things. Firstly, the movement cards mostly move multiple cars, which means it is not as simple as choosing a card to move one’s own car. Secondly, as well as winning prize money for their card finishing the race, players can also bet on other cars to win. As cards move more than one car per turn, it means players have an element of agency in other cars’ movement and can influence how cars do, albeit only to a small degree. The fact players can only own one car caught some people out as did the betting when the first betting line was crossed. But otherwise, everyone got the hang of what they were doing quite quickly.

– Adapted by boardGOATS
from image by BGG contributor kalcio

The auction proceeded with players getting only one opportunity to bid for each car (that caught some people out too), and with several players failing to get the cars they wanted to match their movement cards. And then, Emmerson Purpaldi started the race. Pink’s and Blue’s cars were quickest off the grid and blocked the first corner, before Blue took a narrow lead thanks to Pine shifting her car to clear a path. Burgundy increased Blue’s lead and her car was the first across the first betting line. Blue’s lead was briefly threatened by Black, but she led into the first hairpin and then squatted in the narrow lane causing chaos for everyone behind and lots of cursing.