Gods Love Dinosaurs Review: Eggs Are Hatching!
Intent: Inspire you to try playing Gods Love Dinosaurs.
It is your role to build an ecosystem, which sustains itself with a balance of prey and predators. The catch? You REALLY LOVE dinosaurs! Gods Love Dinosaurs designed by Kasper Lapp, art is done by Gica Tam, published by Pandasaurus is a competitive tile placement game for 2-5 players in which you compete to maintain a food chain to gather the moist points by highly favoring dinosaurs. Will you balance the food chain and create enough food to only end up feeding the dinosaurs?
Overview
Have you ever wanted to command the food chain? Do you love Dinosaurs? In this competitive tile placement game, your goal is simple. Score the most points by laying the most dinosaur eggs and having dinosaurs on the board. This game is a perfect representation of the food chain, you’ll have to manage the prey and predator relationship ensuring you always have enough animals to keep the circle of life flowing.
You will begin with a dinosaur nest with three eggs, a starting board with a dinosaur and one of each prey and their associated habitats. In turn order, players will take a tile from the tile board, where tiles are present in five columns with an different animal symbol at the bottom of each. Tiles can be placed anywhere on your board but it certainly is beneficial to match habitats. As when the last tile of the column is taken, the specific animal underneath activates. The prey expand and multiply into favored habitats and predators hunt for prey, multiplying if they eat two or more.
The dinosaur will rotate between the five columns. When the column with the dinosaur is activated, the dinosaur is activated after the prey or predator. In the dinosaur activation phase, you can breed a dinosaur if your primary mountain with the nest is unoccupied by paying an egg. Then all the dinosaurs may move up to five hexes but MUST end on a mountain. If they do not eat anything along the way, they starve and are removed from the board. If they eat a prey, the dinosaur survives and if they eat a predator, not only do they survive but you receive an egg for each predator eaten. The empty columns are then refilled with tiles and game continues until tiles run out and may not be replaced.
The player with the most points gathered from dinosaur eggs and dinosaurs on the board wins! Will you maintain a healthy food chain or will your ecosystem collapse?
First Game Impression
The first game of Gods Love Dinosaurs was an interesting one. Neither of us were too sure about the right path to take, or how to optimize the points we were collecting. Initially, the response to having a predator on the board was to make your dinosaur eat it immediately but tile by tile you could see our brains start to piece together that there was more at work than meets the eye. Our game was fairly tied as we both ended up with fifteen dinosaur eggs at the end.
Unfortunately, I ended up losing because I was unable to feed my dinosaurs the last activation, while Tylor’s dinosaurs were feeding like there was no tomorrow. Coupled with the learning curve of balancing the food chain appropriately, our scores could have certainly been improved, which meant us playing several more rounds afterwards!
Thoughts After Five Games
Dinosaurs eating everything in sight?! Yeah, this game was a hit to begin with. It definitely secured a space on our shelf and we are excited to introduce this one to our friends when we get the chance as unfortunately COVID-19 has certainly limited our game nights. Honestly, it feels very real having your animals come close to extinction (although mass extinction is not a possibility in this game) and there were moments when I was worried Tylor would take a specific tile, forcing me to get rid of my one and only rat.
Tylor and I learned our lesson from the first game and slowly started to put together our own strategies. The twist came when we played the game with four players. This opened up the game a fair bit with more tiles and a higher chance of your desired tile being picked up in between your turns. On top of that, the choice to activate certain columns felt like it played a bigger role with four players because you could indirectly impact everyone’s ability to do things. It’s funny how adding a couple more people can make a game feel totally different.
Gods Love Dinosaurs is unlike any game we have played. (We have played many but certainly not every game, so would love to hear of other games with a similar feel.) The concept is relatively simple but the game is variable and filled with depth.
MERIT Report Card
Overall Letter Grade: B+
Strengths: This game executes it’s theme almost flawlessly. You feel immersed and pulled into the narrative instantly and the animeeples and artwork are just an added bonus. It’s a game that’s simple to learn but filled with depth and strategy. It’s a game you can easily draw people to who don’t necessary play board games and have a fantastic memorable time with!
Areas of Improvement: Replayability could be improved, I wish there was another element of variation besides just tile drafting, even having an ability to move/draft a tile for an opponent or having a random unique ability with the dinosaurs on your board could have increased replayability quite significantly.
Memorability: B+
How often do I think about the game? Yes. Oh the question is how often? Well, a lot. The artwork, the mechanics, the wonderful animeeples, its certainly a game that sticks with you. There’s also a fair bit of strategy with what you will do with the tiles you’re given that certainly requires quick thinking. Although it’s fairly easy to narrow down what you want to do, knowing when to activate and mess up your opponents food chains is a super interesting aspect to ponder.
How often is the game brought up by the individuals I play with? Well since this was our first video review, we’ve actually had a few friends reach out and ask if we could play this together so that’s always a good sign. Otherwise we did get to introduce this game to a couple of individuals and they’ve found it super fun. It’s an extremely inviting game as it’s fairly easy to teach and invite friends into the hobby with.
How many memories can be built from this game? Many great memories! There’s nothing like activating the tigers and watching you flourish at the right time, while your opponent’s tigers starve. There’s definitely some great moments of timing that provide many laughs, joy but sometimes defeat. It’s also extremely satisfying setting up your dinosaur for a predator feast and getting four eggs from it.
It’s been fun to see how many dinosaurs we indeed can have, and that’s the ultimate challenge breeding as many dinosaurs as possible, and then maintaining their existence.
Education : B+
Well, let’s dive into the obvious first. It’s a really neat way to learn about food chains. It’s a concept we all are fairly familiar with but this game really puts it to a visual where you can see how vulnerable the situation is at times. Certainly made me think of Australia’s frog invasion.
Outside of that, the element that’s less noticeable is the balance between what you and your opponent are doing. It’s easy to get fixated on your own game, but when you account for what your opponent is doing you can really have a fun and tumultuous experience almost battling each other.
Quite a lot of planning ahead. I really like the theme here, as it almost feels like you are a god with foresight, knowing and planning what will happen to these mortal species. You’ll notice yourself planning for how animals expand, feed and multiply but always focusing on the dinosaurs, which just makes sense!
Overall this game has some great educational elements. I would have love to see a page in the rulebook with some animal and dinosaur facts, I think that would have certainly pushed this to the top.
Replayability: B-
This game has a eighty four ecosystem tiles, which you can draft from. The variability from the tiles available to place on the board and where you can place them make it so you’ll likely never have the same game. Each game is an adaptability challenge to the tiles and your opponents, which is really nice because it does generally feel quite the same.
After a while though, there’s only so much you can do. You can definitely pull an impulsive move or be unpredictable but it just might harm you. There’s a formula to this game and a fairly large luck factor in tiles present in order to make it happen. There’s certainly some strategic choices you can make and ways to grow and explore different strategies, which is certainly satisfying.
The replayability is fine. It’s a fast game, so I’m always happy to play it and I have fun, I’m just a hungry dinosaur and crave a bit more here.
Imagination: A
Love the immersive nature of this game. You’re all gods competing to favor the dinosaurs while pretending to balance the food chain? It’s a hilarious and enthralling experience I never knew I wanted.
Not only that, but the art is magnificent! You can really feel the frogs enjoying the lake, rabbits frolicking in the fields and rats scurrying in the forest. The narrative you can play with when predators feed is hilarious as well, you can have an eagle go through a lake, field and forest eating three different animals. That’s one hungry eagle right there.
It almost feels devious setting up the predators around the dinosaur, you can imagine them wonder why they’re so close to the tyrant, then BAM. They’re eaten and dinosaur eggs have been laid. It genuinely feels like you’re developing this ecosystem and have a sick sense of humor.
This game does an exemplary job at the theme and igniting your imagination.
Target: A-
This game is extremely accessible and welcoming, easy to learn and enjoyed by all sorts of folks. I can see us playing this game with either of our families, our friends and would recommend this game to families as well as there’s a lot of neat educational opportunities and it’s a quite simple game to understand. The animeeples are certainly my weakness.
The colorful nature, the fantastic theme will definitely create some memories for you and your friends and I truly believe Pandasaurus and everyone involved in this game did a great job at reaching the broad target market. I’m thrilled to see this game find many homes across the world and create many great experiences as we’ve had.
Tylor’s Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐
What a fantastic way to experience the food chain! I cannot think of another game that really showcases the food chain hierarchy and pushes you to think about the how to keep everything alive while scoring the highest possible score.
I think my favourite part about the game is the pooled tiles and the activating of each animal type. It adds this stress of trying to get things done before someone takes the tile that activates the dinosaur. Or the complete opposite, where you take the last tile in the column with the dinosaur because you are ready to go but not everyone else is! It adds a bit of competitiveness but nothing to ruin friendships over.
Overall, I think the simplicity helps bring in “surface level board gamers” while still attracting the avid gamer. I’m really looking forward to introducing this game to friends and family. I have a good feeling about this one!
Final Thoughts: You’ll love the immersive nature and the challenge behind this game, it’s an absolute blast to play and a joy to share with those around you. We would definitely recommend this game to many as it fulfills our primary goal of inviting more individuals to share in our passion. It’s a game that really does well with individuals who aren’t hobby gamers.
MERIT Report Card Letter Grade: B+
How can you not love the dinosaurs?