If you like dinosaurs (and let’s face it, who doesn’t have at least some interest in them?), DinoGenics could be a game to look at. It’s actually been around for a while, first published by Ninth Haven Games in 2019, but the print run was small and the game’s always been hard to find.
Now, in 2025, it’s getting a makeover and a reissue, along with a new expansion. Sadly, the project’s crowdfunding campaign has ended, but fingers crossed that your favourite retailer’s managed to snag a few copies.
Ninth Haven says: ‘DinoGenics is a competitive worker placement game for one to five players, in which each player attempts to build and run their own successful dinosaur park. By playing workers to the mainland, players will collect resources, build park facilities and create dinosaurs!’
Are you prepared to be the next John Hammond, hopefully without Ian Malcolm telling you how everything’s going to go wrong?
The game is played over seven rounds (why seven—seems a rather arbitrary number), each of which consists of two parts, ‘open season’ and ‘upkeep phase.’ In open season, you entice visitors into your park depending on player order and available hotel space (and visitors generate income which you can spend later); deal with ‘breaking news;’ and place workers in various locations to, for example, gather food, acquire dinosaur DNA, gain money, build hotels and other ‘facilities’ as well as enclosures, draw various types of card, and repair damage. One key action, when you have sufficient DNA (i.e., the required number of cards of a given dinosaur type), is to create that dinosaur and place it in your park—ideally within a suitably sized enclosure, or there could be problems later! Upkeep is when you feed your dinosaurs, but if you don’t have sufficient goats to satisfy the carnivores or there are gaps in your fences, the dinosaurs ‘rampage,’ causing damage to the park or eating visitors. You gain points each round from your dinosaurs and uneaten visitors.
Breaking news introduces global events which affect all players, sometimes positively but more often disastrously, such dinosaurs escaping. In addition, ‘manipulation cards’ can enable more actions or provide other benefits—a subset of them lean towards the illegal side of dinosaur breeding (Dennis Nedry, anyone?), but beware the penalties if you’re caught.
Besides points accumulated along the way, your final score is based on numbers and types of dinosaur in the park, variety of dinosaurs, DNA samples acquired and money gained from visitors, with a deduction for any ‘scandal’ tokens collected as the result doing something dodgy. Specialists—see later—can also contribute to your score.
The rules booklet also details a number of solo scenarios: challenges such as opening the park early before everything’s ready—hmm, what movie does that remind you of?
Expansions
Controlled Chaos was released in 2020, bringing with it aquatic dinosaurs and ‘specialists’ who provide additional perks. It introduced a two-player cooperative mode as well. But it’s not all dinosaurs, though—an amusing minor extra is a mammoth exhibit.
The current expansion, New Arrivals, doesn’t add as much novel cardboard as Controlled Chaos (a few new dinosaur species, and a small number of various card types), but smooths some wrinkles in the earlier game. There’s a new automa solo mode as an alternative to the challenge scenarios, and the introduction of ‘training’ your workers to upgrade their abilities. The original DinoGenics was criticised for the problem of someone getting the lead early on and being pretty much guaranteed to win; Designer Richard Keene says this has been addressed through updated rules and ‘rebalanced’ tiles and cards.
The entire package includes the base game and all of the expansions, with a tidied up new main board combining the original version and the Controlled Chaos one. As with pretty much all crowdfunded projects these days, deluxe tokens and coins are available, too.
Comparisons
The triceratops in the tea-room is Dinosaur Island, which is also getting a Kickstarter retread at time of writing.
At first glance, Dinosaur Island is more ‘cartoonish’ with its vivid colours, giving the impression of an amusement park rather than a scientific establishment—quite amazing what a difference the art styling makes! While both are worker placement games, in Dinosaur Island, the dinosaurs are one resource among many contributing to your success, whereas the emphasis is on the prehistoric beasts themselves in DinoGenics. Although the theming makes DinoGenics feel more immersive, Dinosaur Island is possibly the more complex of the two games, with more knobs to twist and further dice-based randomness.
While the games are different, it’s impossible to state that one is ‘better’ than the other. I think, like Star Trek vs Star Wars, there will be some rabid fans ready to fight for their game, but the rest of us will be perfectly fine with either… or both. A less obvious alternative is Agricola, a similarly complex worker placement game involving resource management, animals and enclosures. I think this game is much closer to DinoGenics than Dinosaur Island is, barring the rather obvious theming. If you prefer farm animals to dinosaurs, this could be a game to take a look at; you probably don’t need both games. Oddly enough, an update to this game can also be spotted on Gamefound. One other game I can’t help but compare it to is Ark Nova, but that might simply be because this is the only ‘big’ animal-based game I regularly play. Although there’s much less emphasis on worker placement in Ark Nova (for a start, there are very few of them to send to the association board), there’s a similar vibe regarding action selection and placing animals into enclosures, though you have more options regarding what to do on your turn with DinoGenics. If you like Ark Nova, you’ll probably like DinoGenics.
Final Words
This is a gorgeous looking game, not difficult to get stuck right into, while also being immersive and sufficiently complex to maintain interest. The solo mode scenarios are interesting puzzles, and the new automa mode could be useful when those are exhasted.
You can find details of this whole drool-worthy dinosaur party on its Gamefound page. You can also give DinoGenics a dry run on BoardGameArena.
Note: this was based on preview material—the final game may differ in some details.
About the author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). 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.
