Dinogenesis Review

 

Right after playing with John I posted this on the Facebook:

"On turn two of Dinogenics John turned to me and asked who else I was going to kill. 

You see, I'd gotten a T-Rex on turn one but hadn't bothered to get the fence to keep him in. He ate some folks. It was a thing in the news. 

Which I covered up.

And I got a huge advantage from the whole debacle, as that T-Rex helped me dramatically throughout the rest of the game. All because of a few eaten schoolchildren.

Yes, school children. John and I couldn't have been laughing harder.

I'm a bad person. I don't care. This game is great"

But a few caveats are in order. This is not a rules-light game. There is a ton of information to process, all of it crucial, and a good deal of it are exceptions to the “normal” rules. The game does not attempt to hold your hand, although it does throw out not-so-subtle hints that being an immoral jerk is going to get you what you want. It merely tells you what's probably the best general way to go about winning... and that's it. 

By the time John and I got done we knew we'd missed a lot, and that was alright with us. We had a ton of fun, laughing for the entirety of our playthrough. But we both acknowledged we'd hardly played the game to its fullest potential. The immediate reason why we didn't in our first playthrough is obvious: there are hundreds of cards and buildings,  more than a few dinosaurs with a couple of stats on them... and it's all very small. That may be my only real complaint, honestly. There's a ton of information on these things and they're quite small, to begin with. So you have to be committed to learning each of these little bits of cardboard that are only a bit larger than my thumb. But these little buildings and the cards and whatnot are potent; once John figured out how powerful they could be he narrowed my lead from thirty points to nine, in two of the seven rounds this game exists in. I looked down at my own stuff and realized I could have been pulling similar shenanigans. 

Fortunately the core gameplay loop is a lot of fun. After you're done bringing in visitors to your park you get to place your workers in differing areas of "the mainland", which let you do various actions. There's just never enough spaces to put stuff down, particularly the space that lets you get rid of scandal tokens, which you can get for a bunch of different things but principally from letting your dinosaurs eat people. Well, that and raiding the boneyard, but we're not talking about that here. The point is, there's not enough spaces, which means going first is crucial. You go first by your reputation score, which is generated by having dinosaurs and buildings. Do not. Do NOT. Forget the buildings. John  and I did, only to find that John focusing on buying and purchasing buildings closed my lead by a significant gap. I still won, but I won by 9 points, not 30. 

This game feels huge. Yuge. John and I knew we had missed the vast majority of the game, but the theme, rules we did get right, and the sheer amount of laughter we had over the dying screams of school children sold the both of us pretty damn hard. Looking up the rules afterwards and realizing that we screwed up a lot we were relieved to discover that my win was still legitimate, more or less; we managed to recognize the game's core, even if we got a lot of the details wrong.

There are solo scenario rules in this book. I've tried one of them and found it to be fun, although not to the same extent. I've not played the others, so I can't speak to them, but that satisfaction of laying out that park is still there. It's so cool to see the fences and dinos and your park... you just can't really deny how freaking close the theme is.