Gods love dinosours... so do we!

What's your favorite thing in a convention? One thing I love about conventions is when there is a game library! The Saturday of the UKGE'24 was quite busy, so we decided to hit the library a little bit earlier to play some games. One of them was 🦖Gods Love Dinosaurs. It is a tile-laying game with some pretty unique ideas. While it's not a new release, I've been wondering how this game is, so when I saw a copy in the library we decided to give it a try!

Over the game players will build out their own ecosystems with tiles depicting 2 hexes. Some show animal symbols - animeeples go on these upon placement. There are 3 kinds of Prey: rats 🐀, rabbits 🐇 and frogs 🐸; and 2 kinds of Predators: tigers 🐅 and eagles 🦅.  

⚙️ The main gimmick of the game is how these animals will breed and multiply every now and then when tiles in their column run out,  spreading on their specific biome. At least Prey do. As for Predators they have to eat Prey around them - eat enough and they multiply too, or have no nearby Prey and they starve. As you might think, having too many Predators won't be good, as feeding them becomes harder and harder. This is where the titular dinosaurs 🦖 come into the picture: they can only eat Predators and generate eggs with each one eaten. 🧐 Eggs are the source of your victory points, so optimally feeding dinos is the main puzzle. 

You have to build out your ecosystem well so Prey have space to expand to, and you have to keep Predators eating them to keep things optimal. Too few or too many Prey or Predators could be problematic, so striking a nice rhythm and balance is essential. You have some direct influence to activate animals by drafting tiles from their specific column, but other players might want different things. 

💬 The table presence with the colorful terrain and meeples is exquisite, but ultimately we found the gameplay a bit monotonous. The puzzle is interesting, but ultimately you keep doing the same things over and over.