Sometimes you just want to play a simple game. One that doesn't take 20 minutes to set up and four hours to play. Maybe you have half an hour to kill before it's time to leave for a movie, or you're waiting for everyone to show up for game night.
At the same time, maybe you also need to imagine that you are hunting dinosaurs for your dinosaur zoo.
The only solution is Dino Hunt Dice, a nifty little risk management game from Steve Jackson Games.
Players roll three dice at a time, chosen randomly from a cup. Each die has three symbols on it: a dinosaur, a fern leaf, and a footprint. There are three different colors of dice in the pool - green dice have fewer footprints and more dinosaurs, yellow have an equal number of each, and red are the most dangerous, with more footprints than dinosaurs.
Each dinosaur rolled scores one point. Fern leaves mean the dinosaur is hiding, and you roll the die again. A player can end their turn after any roll and bank their points, or they can keep pulling more dice out of the cup, rolling three at a time, but if you ever have three footprints showing on the dice you've rolled, your turn ends and you don't score any points for that turn.
It's an amusing little game and a great exercise in knowing when to quit. Plus it has dice with little dinosaurs on them, which is good enough for me.
Rating: 3 (out of 5) A very simple game and not something we'd spend a lot of time playing, but for what it is it's pretty fun.
- Dino Hunt Dice official website
- Dino Hunt Dice on BoardGameGeek.com
Date played: December 29, 2013