Review: Gods Love Dinosaurs (Pandasaurus Games)

It’s good to be a deity. You get a world to shape, populate, and make exactly the way you want. It’s a living laboratory crossed with an entertainment complex, a globe-sized Mall of America made to your exacting specifications.

And your specifications definitely include dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs.

That’s the premise behind Gods Love Dinosaurs from Pandasaurus Games. This game mixes tile placement and set collecting with a wicked tension between luck, skill, and timing.

Take a break from your deific duties and we’ll take a look at the top five things you need to know about Gods Love Dinosaurs.

Starting Your World

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Each player starts with a basic world tile containing four habitats. You populate your world with one dinosaur and some prey animals. You also get a dinosaur nest with three eggs.

Every animal flourishes in a particular habitat. Frogs love lakes, rabbits run in fields, and rats do their thing in forests.

Dinosaurs live in mountains, which makes mountain spaces the most valuable type of terrain in the game. If you don’t have enough mountains, you can’t grow dinosaurs. And if you can’t grow dinosaurs, you lose the game. (We tested this theory. It’s sound.)

Predators and Prey

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Where you have prey, you also need predators. Luckily you can introduce stealthy tigers and swooping eagles into your world by adding tiles with their icons to your world (more about adding tiles in a moment).

This sets up the game’s key tension: Its ecosystem.

You need prey animals (represented by some incredibly cute meeples) to feed the predators. The more prey that predators eat, the more the predators reproduce.

Dinosaurs can eat prey to stay alive, but eating predators gives them enough food to create new eggs. The trick is balancing everything in the chain so prey reproduce, predators get plump, and dinosaurs enjoy their toothy buffet.

Linking Your Food Chain

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Each round, players expand their world with a new land tile. If the tile has a picture of a prey or predator, then you add one of those pieces as well. That’s how predators begin spreading in your world.

The land tiles are displayed in five columns on a very clever thing called the “animal board.”

Below the spaces for the land tiles, each column shows one prey or predator animal. When the last land tile is taken from a column, that animal activates for all players. Prey animals reproduce in their habitats; predators eat and reproduce wherever they find prey.

This system sets up a fun challenge. The tile you want may be in the frog column, but by taking the last tile from the rat column, you can activate the rats and set yourself up to feed your predators on a future turn. These decisions can also drive a harsh player-versus-player mechanic in the game where you activate a particular animal before another player is ready.

Feeding Dinosaurs

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The animal board also has an extra space in every column for the dinosaur token.

At the beginning of the game, you put one dinosaur in the first space on the left side of the animal board. When the column activates, the column’s animal does its thing and then the dinosaurs feed.

Since dinosaurs aren’t as active as prey and predators, they only activate if the dinosaur token is in the right column.

Dinosaurs only live in mountains, so you need to make sure they have food nearby. This ties back into everything with the food chain, since it’s easy to eat too many of the wrong animal and accidentally wipe out everything in an area, leaving nothing for the dinosaur to eat. Oops.

Refilling Tiles and Ending the Game

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In another interesting game tension, you only refill land tiles on the animal board after the dinosaurs activate. That makes the choice of when to activate the dinosaurs even more important.

Refilling the animal board also serves as the game’s end trigger. If you can’t completely refill the animal board, then the game ends immediately. Every time you play, a random group of tiles won’t make it into the game, which adds to the game’s randomness and replayability.

Verdict

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On the surface, Gods Love Dinosaurs looks like a family game built on indirect competition. But underneath that friendly veneer, this game has teeth.

When you combine the random order that the tiles appear on the animal board with the timing issues of when to activate which animal, the game can become highly competitive very quickly.

For best family and friend gameplay experience, we recommend agreeing to either “play nice” or “play mean” when you start. That keeps everyone on the same page and avoids late-game crises and tears.

For a true family-friendly variant, try randomly giving every player a mountain tile to play at the beginning of the game. That ensures all players have an equal chance of winning and blunts some of those sharply competitive dino teeth in the process.