Rebellion Unplugged have announced a new game from the mind of Stephen Baker coming to Gamefound - Dino Battle!
Baker is the man known as the founder of Games Workshop 90s classics like Hero Quest and Space Crusade, but not many know of his collaboration with Roger Ford on Die Schlacht der Dinosaurier, or Battle of the Dinosaurs, back in the early 90s, seeing as it only had a European release... Well, last year that game came into the limelight a tad with the launch of Saurozoic Warriors Arena on Kickstarter. Designed by Baker so people started looking into his past dinosaur combat game history, but apart from the designer and theme there was not too much relation.
Recently though, I was scrolling on Gamefound checking out some other projects when I spotted Dino Battle and immediately chanced a look as my first thoughts were someone was trying to rip off the original game, until a quick read brought me down to Stephen Baker’s name and instantly it had my full attention!
So what do we know about Dino Battle? Here’s a quick run down and comparison with the original from all info available through the current preview page.
First the obvious, Stephen Baker and Roger Ford have combined to bring this modern updated version to us. The art is all updated and it’s lost the links to the Dark World game setting it used to have (as far as I can tell, will need more info to confirm).
The game still plays 2 to 4 players, but one thing that strikes me is the graphics that state two rival tribes, this makes me wonder if a 4 player game now becomes a 2v2 team game rather than the original free for all it used to be. The graphics also say we can control 6 species, so this matches up with the original games and from the images I have checked them off, the T-Rex, Raptor, Pteranodon (or whichever flying Pterosaur) and Triceratops are all still there. We still have the large Sauropod but now it’s a Brachiosaurus instead of the previous Plateosaurus, and then there used to be a Stegosaurus unit that now appears to have been replaced with a smaller armoured dinosaur. But, it would mean the general unit has been removed. The original game featured the General who could move and combat whenever any other dinosaur species did, but if he was lost then you went from playing 3 to 2 action cards each turn.
I guess on this subject I should look at the gameplay. This used to be you would play 2 or 3 action cards from hand and redraw from a shared deck, the dinosaur cards would let you move or boost their attack determined by the printed number and the remainder of combat involved rolling identical dice of varying values, the number of dice based on the dinosaur you were using. At first glance Dino Battle looks to use the same system, but with some key differences. It looks like each player gets their own individual card deck, meaning there’s no more luck of the draw for opponents drawing better cards than you. The dice are also the same but different, the generic white dice look to mostly match the originals, with 1, 5, 10, 15 and blank on several faces, but also now have a side that appears to show ZZZ instead of the 2, and then in a bit of modernisation there is a new red dice that has sides like a 20 or an image that appears it lets you draw a card. Interested to find out what variations this all brings.
Some other changes is the introduction of energy crystals that are mentioned, these may link up with the separate card deck and the matching symbols on tokens on the map, unknown at current although I believe they are referred to as arcane glyphs. But speaking of the map, instead of a fixed board it now comes as modular and double-sided so can be set up in a variety of ways. This might affect things such as the appearance of energy crystals, or the blood fruit of Skull mountain which has replaced the volcano and lava rocks.
Makes sense though as the original game had the fixed volcano in the centre and this board layout makes it more tricky to have that, but what we do get is some smaller rocky outcrops here and there. Mostly they seem to be obstacles but also there are some stonehenge like monuments raised on some of them matching the player colours. Going off this and the text “Win control of sacred shrines or simply hunt enemies to extinction” it seems like as well as the original goal of eliminating the competition there is now a win condition for some sort of area control victory too, will have to wait for more details regarding that.
Not much else to mention, the game features artwork by The Mico and all the figure sculpts are taken from this and brought to life. I’ll be honest, I’m not currently a fan of the change compared to the older models, and it does say that everything is currently not final and subject to change. But perhaps if there were actual real examples to look at I could form an actual opinion, as at the moment everything I’ve seen just look like computer generated images of the final product.
Erm, I guess the only other thing to mention is that on BoardGameGeek we can already see there is nothing to announce about a solo mode but Rebellion are aware of demand, so perhaps this is something they are looking into, which will be interesting. No fixed launch date yet but I’ll still be following the campaign, Battle Of The Dinosaurs is a fun game regardless of its age, so if 30+ years of game design have gone into improving it then I’ll be really happy to try out an updated version, I’ll wait and see…
