Like the original Zoo Tycoon, this is a heavyweight 1–4-player zoo simulation game, but this time—as I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear—involving dinosaurs. I do like a good dinosaur game and have fond memories of the original PC Zoo Tycoon games with the Dinosaur Digs expansion (Can you hear the game’s music track yet? Definitely background music for the board game!).
Having mentioned the word ‘expansion,’ I should point out that this is a standalone game, and can’t be used as an expansion to the first Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game. Unlike DinoGenics, which I’ve covered before, and Dinosaur Island, both of which are fun Jurassic Park dino spectacles, Dinosaur Digs is a more serious park management game. The rulebook states: ‘In Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game—Dinosaur Digs, you are the manager of a newly opened dinosaur zoo. Dispatch your workers to collect fossils/DNA from around the world and expand your zoo by constructing new enclosures and buildings. Boost your popularity by cloning exciting new species and secure the support of the government by advancing scientific knowledge. However, be careful to have adequate safety measures in place. When dealing with such unknown and potentially dangerous creatures, who knows what accidents could happen?’
Gameplay Summary
You play over 7 rounds, each representing one year, comprising 4 seasons:
- spring, when you send out your workers to perform fieldwork by collecting fossils and DNA (in the form of poker-style chips), as well as technology tokens;
- summer, when breeding takes place (the game includes male and female dinosaurs for you to pair up to produce eggs, which will hopefully hatch), fossils are decoded, and dinosaurs can be cloned;
- autumn, a time for construction and maintenance of enclosures and other buildings (where scoring potential can be increased through optimising the types and arrangements of buildings in the zoo);
- and winter, upkeep and scoring for the year.
In a nice immersive touch, when you’ve built the necessary buildings, some of the areas workers are sent to are now within your zoo board, making it feel like they’re actively doing stuff in your zoo.
There are 2 score tracks, popularity and science, and your final score is the lower of the pair. However, it’s not enough to focus on just one, as you need to make progress along both to make enough money to develop your zoo and to unlock necessary technologies. Dinosaurs are much more than the attractively painted wooden meeples; you also get a species stats board, giving you details of the beasties—how much they cost, what they contribute to your zoo’s popularity and science, what terrain they prefer, how they interact with others of their own and different species, as well as tracks where, during this upkeep phase, you actively manage their ‘happiness’ and danger levels, leading to those ‘accidents’ mentioned above. The accidents, sadly (!!), are very low-key: just a penalty such as losing the use of a worker for the next round.
Campaign
The campaign page is fairly sparse: not a huge amount about gameplay currently (on launch day), though there are links to rulebooks and a single rules run-through video. The page lists game contents, with lots of lovely pictures, and on that note, I like that Marc notes ‘All of the components shown are photos, not 3D renderings,’ so what you see is what you get (though he does admit that ‘There may still be some changes), as compared to some other campaigns where the majority of the images are computer renderings.
Reprints of the original Zoo Tycoon and its expansions, including a new Additional Species Pack 2.0 one, are bolted on to this campaign, and you can fork out £250 (plus VAT and shipping) to get absolutely everything, if you so desire. If you’re not so keen on dinosaurs, but want the original Zoo Tycoon and/or any of the expansions, you can pledge for just those.
Weirdly, one of the add-ons is a complete duplicate set of the 226 meeples for Dinosaur Digs—does anyone really need twice as many dinos??
Verdict
Like Zoo Tycoon, this is a game that needs a lot of time and concentration (and a goodly amount of table space—it also comes in a pretty big box), though it has been streamlined somewhat compared to the original, especially the marketplace through which you acquire animals. A criticism sometimes made of Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game is that you spend a lot of time doing the calculations the computer does for the video game version, and the same is true here. Some people might like dealing with the minutiae, but I’m afraid I’m not one of them—I prefer my zoo critters simple!
Along similar lines, there was something relaxing about playing the video game, configuring settings and watching the game play itself, but here, you’re forced to grind through the same upkeep cycles multiple times. I think I prefer some of the earlier mentioned games, where there’s more emphasis on ‘exciting’ events and less on the bookkeeping aspects of running a zoo.
That being said, it is a very attractive and incredibly immersive game, and will appeal to a lot of people—the campaign’s already 200% funded after less than an hour. Should someone who already has Zoo Tycoon get Dinosaur Digs? It depends on 3 things, I think: do you like the theme, do you want the smoother gameplay, and do you want 2 huge boxes taking up shelf space?
If you don’t have the original game, which should you get? I reckon the gameplay improvements make Dinosaur Digs the winner, but I do wish Marc had created a Zoo Tycoon v2 with the original animal theme and the new game mechanics. (Mathias, if you’re reading, I wonder if Ark Nova, my favourite zoo-based game, will ever gain a dinosaur expansion, though I do note a few fan-created dinos can be found within the game’s file section on BoardGameGeek).
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and World Order, with a side of Dune: Imperium - Uprising and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
