Review: Tiny Epic Dinosaurs (Gamelyn Games)

Don’t let the cute box art with playful dinosaurs and a sunny sky fool you. Tiny Epic Dinosaurs by Gamelyn Games packs a stunning amount of strategy into its classic little box.

Thematically, Tiny Epic Dinosaurs may be “a game of dinosaur ranching,” but it’s so much more, too. It mixes resource gathering, worker placement, a very clever modular board design, and some wicked engine building opportunities into a challenging yet accessible strategy board game.

Let’s look in the incubator and see what’s growing for the top five things you need to know about Tiny Epic Dinosaurs.

Begin with the Win in Mind

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Success in Tiny Epic Dinosaurs goes to the player with the most victory points. You get victory points in three ways: Filling contracts, expanding research, and growing dinosaurs.

The largest reservoir of points comes from completing the public and private contracts, where you literally trade dinosaurs for points. But that’s not the only path to victory.

You also earn victory points by purchasing research cards that give you unique dinosaurs or new facilities, all packed with special powers.

Finally, since the name of the game is dinosaurs, you also earn points by filling your ranch to the brim.

By now, you’re probably starting to feel the game’s tense decision-making begin to build. And you’d be right.

Digging into the Dinos

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The game includes a whopping 75 dinosaur meeples covering all the types of dinosaurs at your disposal.

The most important ones are the four “regular” species because they directly score you points. These include two herbivores (stegosaurus and brachiosaurus) and two carnivores (velociraptor and allosaurus). Tiny Epic Dinosaurs includes a pool of 60 minis for them, with 15 of each type.

The remaining 15 unique dinosaurs have special powers. They’re the key to opening up the game’s engine building opportunities. Get the right two or three of these special dinosaurs working together and you’ll have anything from cascades of food to extra actions galore.

Ranching Through a Round

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The game plays across exactly six rounds, so time is always a key limitation. Each round consists of several phases.

Players start the round by collecting resources from the open, unpopulated spaces on their respective ranch maps.

Next, players choose actions by placing their rancher meeples on the action spaces of the modular game board. Options include buying new dinosaurs, getting barriers to build paddocks, purchasing research cards, gathering extra resources, and completing contracts, among other things.

Once everyone finishes, players start arranging their dinosaurs and building paddocks, making sure that the paddocks are completely sealed and that different dinosaurs don’t share the same space (because if they do, they won’t be sharing for long).

Feeding comes after that. Players must watch their food levels because hungry dinosaurs escape their pens and wreak mayhem on your ranch. Finally, pairs of dinosaurs in the same paddock produce new dinosaurs which go into unoccupied paddocks.

Scoring Public and Private Contracts

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Filling your ranch with dinosaurs is fun, but you get more victory points by discarding your dinosaurs to fulfill contracts.

Each round starts with three available public contracts. Each player also gets one private contract per game which they receive during setup. Each contract lists three or four dinosaurs needed to claim it and the number of victory points the contract is worth.

To fulfill a public contract, you put a rancher (worker) onto one of the contract action spaces, claim the contract, and discard the necessary dinosaurs from your ranch.

After completing a public contract, you can complete your private contract on that same turn, but only if you have the right dinosaurs left in your ranch. That takes careful planning and execution. Moments like this make Tiny Epic Dinosaurs such an engaging game.

Population Versus Food and Resources

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One of the game’s strongest and most beautiful tensions is dinosaur population versus available food and resources.

Every ranch map has 11 spaces that contain the same mix of five plants, three meat, and one crate of supplies, although each of the double-sided maps puts them in a different arrangement thanks to water hazards and mountain ranges.

You need dinosaurs to complete your contracts, but dinosaurs take up space. If a dinosaur is standing in a space with a food or supplies icon, then that space doesn’t product its good during your turn. But if you leave too many spaces open to get more food, you can’t finish contracts because you don’t have enough dinosaurs. Feeling the pressure yet?

Verdict

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Tiny Epic Dinosaurs is game design magic at its best. We highly recommend it.

The game’s open-ended strategies give players plenty of paths to victory, all of them studded with high replayability. There’s even a solo play mode for those rainy weekends when your friends can’t come over.

Whether you go for the win through fulfilling contracts, expanding research, cultivating your dinosaur herd, or finding a unique mixture of all three, Tiny Epic Dinosaurs will keep you coming back to the table for more dinosaur ranching fun.