It took a little convincing for me to pick up Tiny Epic Dinosaurs. I already have two dinosaur-themed worker placement games that I like quite a bit (Dinosaur Island and Dinogenics), and I didn't enjoy the last Tiny Epic game I bought, Tiny Epic Mechs -- I thought it was overly gimmicky and possibly a signal that the series had jumped the shark. But, my affection for dinosaur-shaped meeples won out, and I ended up buying Tiny Epic Dinosaurs after all.
It's definitely a triumphant return to form for the normally very clever Tiny Epic series. Unlike most of the other games in this oddly crowded sub-genre, this one isn't about building a dinosaur zoo. Thematically it's about catching and breeding the animals and then selling them off, so it could just as easily be based on the 1962 John Wayne classic Hatari!, although that game might have a harder time finding an audience.
The worker placement mechanisms are straightforward and easy to understand, but still offer meaningful decisions as you agonize over what type of dinosaur to try to breed first, or struggle to to have enough food and space on your ranch for your expanding population. An interesting wrinkle that I haven't seen in other games of this type is that your resource collection is based on how many empty spaces you have on your ranch board, so the more dinosaurs you have standing around, the fewer units of food you're going to collect each turn. This makes the game a balancing act between saving up larger groups of dinosaurs for a better payday, or going for a quicker trade-in that might be worth fewer points but clears much needed space.
One of the main selling points of the Tiny Epic games is their compactness, and that is definitely true here -- this is a lot of game for how little space it takes up on the table. We recently played Tiny Epic Dinosaurs and Dinogenics back-to-back, and it was a little difficult to justify the fact that Dinogenics takes up easily ten times as much space for what amounts to a very similar game experience. However, I did find myself wishing that the Tiny Epic Dinosaurs components were maybe 25% larger than they are, especially the tiny print on the tiny cards that my aging eyes are starting to struggle with.
Rating: 5 (out of 5) This is easily my second favorite in the Tiny Epic series (after Tiny Epic Western), and the relatively low price point and shelf footprint make it easy to add to any game collection.
- Tiny Epic Dinosaurs official website
- Tiny Epic Dinosaurs on BoardGameGeek