The theme of Cretaceous Rails is that time travel has been fully solved without all those nasty paradoxes, so rather than Jurassic Parking the entertainment world instead just bring the tourists direct to the real thing! Clear away jungle to reveal the massive creatures and show them off to the tourists, construct your train network and resort in competition with your fellow time-travellers, can you get the most reputable dinos to make your resort the richest!
The Unboxing
Originally funding through Kickstarter, frequent crowdfunding fans won’t be surprised to see the larger than Kallax hole sized box. Nor will the chunky plasticy goodness inside be a surprise either. Although, there is quite a mix of components in here. Plastic dinosaur and tourist figures are found alongside wooden trees for the map, but then the players have both plastic trains to place on the main board and cardboard train tokens for placing the components on their own personal boards. The inserts inside the box are nice and very well designed keeping everything organised and in place, there’s actually two of them in there to do the job. The bottom one holds all the chunky bits in several separate compartments while the top has the cards, tiles and snug designated slots for all the main boards. The impressive design works well even down to the extra space allowing the first expansion to all fit in there too.
The rule book is also well done, it’s clear and colourful with plenty of examples. Plus a glossary at the back explaining what all the card effects are if you get stuck on the iconography, numbered too which makes it even easier to search. The one tricky bit was the wild tourist/dinosaur symbols which aren’t described in the same place as the rest but mentioned later on in the cards section. Once you find them though it’s easy to remember, and plus it makes sense that they feature all four colours present on the others.
What Paradox?
When setting up to play Cretaceous Rails you populate the map in proportion to the number of players. After laying out the starting board on the table each player chooses a map board to add and extend it further, filling with dinosaurs, jungle and tourists as printed. Each player starts with a different company board that comes with different starting dinosaurs and ratings for each kind, but the starting positions on the map are picked in reverse player order so it balances going later to begin with.
The entire game happens over 4 rounds, each turn placing out 4 executive meeples onto a 4x4 action grid. You pick a spot between two different actions and get to use both, so each round you’ll have 8 actions total. Action spots might let you clear away jungle, take tourists on a safari, build your resort or capture dinosaurs to display. There’s also a general action to empty your train carriages which you can always take in place of any regular action and you may need to take often depending on how fast you acquire things from the jungle.
Building up your resort is one of the more important actions, the cards used not only give you extra benefits during the game through improving actions or extending your train, but also allow you to score more points for your dinosaurs and are required for all the remaining end game scoring opportunities, and only the resort earning the most can be declared the winner!
Choo Choo
There are two main aspects of gameplay that define a game of Cretaceous Rails, the main board and the Action Tile selection. The main board requires planning and route building to establish your train network, where sharing some similarities with Ticket To Ride you can only place trains on set marked routes found between the tiles and at most only 2 trains can be on each, meaning it is possible to block off other player routes and force them to take a longer route around. Although in practice I found this doesn’t happen as often and rarely is intentionally done, the board generally has enough room for the players to forge their way through the map separately, though there are generally some more desirable locations to get to. Volcanos offer interesting views tourists of all types and cabins in the jungle hold additional tourists waiting to go on safari, which is important to mention as the map doesn’t refill during the game. So once a tourist has been on safari or a dinosaur had been taken they don’t get replaced, meaning gradually the map slowly empties out and you’ll need to start reaching further afield.
But before you get around to fighting over the map you’ll first need to fight over the previously mentioned Action Tiles. There are 16 actions arranged in a 4x4 grid so 24 possible spots to choose from. Some may have similar choices each side but most may be unique for the round and once a spot is taken no-one else can choose that, well not unless they have a resort card that allows them to ignore that rule. Going earlier in turn order can become crucial as you may want to do something like both cut jungle and capture a dinosaur in the same go, but there might only be one spot that allows for it, if you don’t take it first then you might need two turns to do what you want. And then this is where much of the competition in action selection arises, as having to pause after cutting down the jungle one turn means the dinosaurs may have been taken by a rival resort before the next!
So you want to go early turn order, well good thing first player can change hands before the next round simply by choosing the action that contains the first player token, and if you’re lucky enough that nobody uses that tile well you get to keep it next round too! The action grid gets shuffled between each round, so you don’t know what options will be available next, meaning that action you spent on grabbing First Player could just become more crucial than you realise.
The other important part of the game is building up your resort. It has to be constructed in levels and each action only lets you build one level at a time, well unless again you already have a resort card in play to bypass this. When placing cards into the resort you first need to have the required resources on the card already in the resort, either tourists, dinosaurs or trees, and then you can choose where to place it. Almost all resort cards are better placed on the highest level where they give the most benefit or the cheapest costs, but in order to place higher you need other cards on lower levels to support them, so some cards you might have to play earlier for less value in order to maximise others. Again just one of the many choices you need to make during the game. Although importantly each card’s end game scoring is unaffected by placement so sometimes just getting the card built can be a priority.
Time-Travel Finds A Way
Sometimes the player interaction in Cretaceous Rails seems far apart with everyone doing their own thing, and it could possibly be entirely possible for all players to mostly specialise in one type of dinosaur for example and stay out of each other’s way. But gradually people will start to compete, whether intentionally or not. You’ll be nabbing dinosaurs before the competitors have managed to show them off to their personal tourist supply, or two players may take the same route to the nearest cabin forcing a third to backtrack around and end up a turn behind. Towards the end you may find some actions taking high priority and getting quickly used up on the grid and you need to almost waste a second action just to do the one you need. But, even though it’s possible, none of the direct interactions have ever felt really take-that to me. All points are scored at the end game so it can be hard to tell who is in the lead at any given time, you can roughly look at how many dinosaurs they’ve collected of certain colour and what their current ratings are for them, but all the extra points from the resort cards will be a bit of a mystery until later. So there was never a real dive to intentionally sabotage any particular player, plus there’s almost always a way around and rarely would anyone feel completely locked out from doing anything on their turn, usually just annoyed that the action to net them a tidy some of points got fully used up before it came around again.
Mostly that comes down to wanting to play optimally. Of course building more than one resort card each time saves on action, why capture one dinosaur a turn if you can get two and so on. Most of this relates to building up the resort and choosing when to unload your trains, it costs an action to do this but it can be done for free at round end or with certain resort cards and good action economy is always going to end up well, if other players don’t get in your way that is, which you may find less often at lower player counts. Because even though the map is scaled by players, you always have the same amount of action tiles. Removing any would significantly alter the gameplay but less players leaves more actions available and less competition for the ones you want. Depending on how your group enjoys games you might prefer always playing at the maximum playing count.
One other point about playing with less than 4 is potential advantages for some of the starting players. Each board has a different dinosaur preference on beginning ratings and what you start with. Now for 4 players there’s one of each type available to begin with so equal opportunity, but for 2 or 3 players you will only have 2 or 3 of the 4 dinosaurs available open at the start while the remainder are in jungle. Now, I’ve never noticed an issue but potentially if your starting resort makes you want the dinosaur that requires you to cut down a tree first you never know if that extra action needed could slow you down or not. Perhaps there are recommended board to start for lower counts, or maybe it truly doesn't matter. (Or potentially use one of the modules listed below.)
One of the big selling points of the game is the table presence and all the large plastic dinosaurs, which yes may be nice to see but can cause some clunkiness during gameplay. The triceratops for example has a fairly large base, so if you have a tile with the dinosaur and some jungle in between multiple train routes going around the hex it can all get a bit cluttered. Some people may have preferred to have everything as standard meeples, and well if you’re one of them then you may be in luck, the game had a reprint campaign which had options to either get the original plastic dinosaur or a new wooden meeple version, so potentially you can take your pick! There are also two expansions, the Skies expansion that was packaged with the first Kickstarter and then the Seas expansion introduced in the second crowdfund. Now, I’m not certain on the set-up for Seas, but Skies added several modular expansions, probably the best way to do it to pick and choose the ones you like. Out of that box there’s only one I’ve used so far and that was just the plastic volcanos to go on the game board and match everything else haha.
You’ll also find a solo mode included in the box for all those single players out there, but that’s for a different review post (although I did see a suggestion to use the system in lower player counts to block off action spaces, something to test perhaps?)
Welcome… to Cretaceous Park
So I have to say that Cretaceous Rails is one of the best dinosaur games I’ve picked up in recent years. There’s never one true strategy to take in order to win, some games have been won by a player monopolising one type of dinosaur and resort card type, others by the player who managed to spread out their points the most evenly. For those who like to plan everything into one clear strategy from the start you may not enjoy it as much, it’s not like plans fail but more often you can find yourself altering them through the game when you just can’t quite get the actions you need or the resort cards you want. But rarely is this through bad luck as the game mitigates most of the random elements. Multiple Action Tiles so unless you are unlucky enough to have the actions you need in all the corners you shouldn’t get locked out of doing certain things, not unless you leave it all until the last round the same as everyone else. The resort cards come on a display of 8 at a time, and if needed you can send a tourist to a focus group to refresh 4, plus the whole display get refreshed automatically between rounds, so you won’t be slowly hunting through a deck for a particular card hopefully.
Generally, if you can find ways to make full use of your actions and get the right resort cards to make those actions do even more then you’ll be off to a good start. Some of the resort cards feel stronger than others, but generally they will be more expensive to play and require building on the top level of the resort for full effect, so you can worry less about what the cards do and more about how to turn your strategy to benefit. Not much else to say, if you’re into dinosaurs or Euro-style games then I suggest you grab a copy of Cretaceous Rails now!
About the author:
Hi I'm Sean, chocolate factory operator by day, Zatu blogger by night. I'm a fan of all games but a bigger fan of anything with dinosaurs. Come check out my gaming pics and videos on my socials: https://m.youtube.com/@franksiegames https://www.instagram.com/franksiegames/
