First Look at Welcome to Dino World

What’s that deafening roar? Is it the T Rex feasting on its latest victim? One of the other giant ancient lizards you’ve dutifully cloned? Or is it the excited crowd charging through the gates of your newly opened Jurassic Park Dino World!?

Welcome to Dino World is the latest Roll & Write I’ve tried and it has a damn good shout at being the best. No relation to famously successful ‘flip and write’ Welcome to Your Perfect Home (which, for context, I haven’t played), Dinoworld comes from Dice Hospital publisher Alley Cat Games and surprising no one, it is a game about building your dino park. And it’s great!

It’s great not only because you get to draw little cartoon dinosaurs. It’s great not only because of the variability introduced each game from special buildings and objectives which you compete for with your immediate neighbours only. It’s great because you get to plan and draw your very own park across the grid of your player board with all the mistakes and elegant solutions that come along with that. More so than any other Roll & Write I can think of, Welcome to Dino World lets you create something that is yours.

Now, at the very core of Roll & Writes is the concept of permanence. You have committed to a thing, and therefore it must be yours, you own that decision. But they never feel like they have room for creativity. Take the Imperial Settlers Dice Game that I also played at the UKGE. Without wishing to cast aspersions against it, you are looking to tick off the things the designer has chosen for you to tick off. The challenge is to find the most efficient way of doing that. Welcome to Dino World, rather than giving you binary tickable/crossable boxes gives you a canvas and some objects that can be placed on it, some general targets, and lets you get to work.

Dinosaur pens have to be a certain number of squares, but they can be any shape you like. The bigger pens need to be connected to power generators but any number of pens can draw power from a single generator, rewarding ingenious solutions. Likewise those variable buildings will interact with the core elements in interesting ways. Everything needs to be connected up with paths. Because any space can potentially be used for any of these purposes the number of possible parks explodes towards the infinite and there you give the player the freedom to create.

And most importantly for pure entertainment value, to fail spectacularly. Even in the basic game poor road building will hamstring your park but the advanced game (which I sadly haven’t played yet) how many generators you need to contain these beasts is an unknown variable which introduces the most thematically delightful game of push your luck with the delicious morsels innocent tourists’ lives at stake. But more importantly your points.

As with all roll & writes its a fairly heads down and think affair but if you enjoy a good spatial puzzle this is definitely one to check out!

This first look is based on a demo at the UK Games Expo 2019.