Jurassic Park proved one thing categorically back when it changed cinema forever in 1993: dinosaurs and theme parks are excellent together. Okay, before you start, I know that in real life they wouldn’t be a good thing, because Jurassic Park proved that all the dinos are bound to escape and chomp on everyone’s head. So I was wrong at the start. JP proved two things, not one thing. But it’s a great film that all reasonable people love, and it led to a bunch of other films in the series that are almost all excellent (only Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is bad, and I’ll fight you if you say otherwise), and then there’s some awesome videogames, and even board games have wisely jumped on the bandwagon. Dinos and theme parks, dudettes. Can’t be beat.
Let’s chat today, then, about Dinosaur Island Fully Charged edition, which is the definitive version of a highly regarded dino theme park game. That’s a solid description, right? That’s tempting already. Well, how about I tell you that it comes with magnetic dino meeples that stick to the punchboard and stay in place. Over 100 magnetic Meeples will be included in the game. I’ll be honest, this is already giving me a lot of ideas, the kind of ideas that are going to result in a sizeable amount of magnetic dino meeples getting lost and an equally sizeable amount of regret.
For this ultra-super-duper version, all the game boards have been updated to neoprene mats, the punchboard has had metal inserted into the layers of cardboard and the Dino Meeples, Scientists, Workers, Guests (yes even the hooligans) have small magnets embedded in them so they lock into place and stay there. No more table bumps to worry about. For this version, there have been balance tweaks to dinosaurs, changes in the order of scoring, changes in the aquatic dinosaurs and the small carnivores mechanisms.
If that’s not enough, there are also two new executives, ten new specialists, seven new objectives, and two new modules (temporary workers and DNA tokens). Small carnivores have been given pack bonuses – when you create multiple they grant special excitement bonuses for eating hooligans (unpaid guests), every aquatic dino now has a unique ability when guests visit. More variability, more strategy and we took 10+ years of game data and smoothed out a lot of balance issues and player feedback to make this the best Dinosaur Island not just with the components but also the gameplay.
I know you know that you want to find out more about this, so you know I know the link you need for the Kickstarter, and here it is: Link. You can’t miss a link called link. I mean, if you do, then you might as well be… extinct.
About the author:
Steve is currently a freelance board game blogger, but often dreams of life as a pirate, or as a ghost herder in the Lake District, or as an evil estate agent who sells haunted houses for his own dark pleasure. Instead of figuring out how to do these jobs in real life like a normal lunatic, he tries to write about them instead, and releases the resultant books upon the unsuspecting world via famous digital bookstores. More books are bound to follow. Find this peculiar entity here: www.instagram.com/positively.board
