Hey all, Sam and David here today.
We’re going to have another game night tomorrow, and it’s going to be a lot of fun. All of our game nights have been fun, and it’s cool to sit around the table playing board games and dice games and card games, and usually having snacks alongside. Mostly it’s because of the good company. All in all it’s a pleasant way to spend an evening, and we look forward to it.
And we have a whole lot of games in our collection, so we don’t know exactly what we’re going to play, but it’s possible that we’re going to play the game we’re talking about today…because we bought it last week, and tried it out that day…and it was just so fun.
Anyway, welcome to another post for Tabletop Tuesday, a series on the blog where we discuss board games, card games, dice games, TTRPGs, and tabletop game accessories. There is a lot out there to talk about, with more coming out all the time. Actually, we’re already planning ahead for Gen Con, and getting ready for all the shenanigans that come with four days of tabletop gaming. I’m sure we’ll have a really fun time talking about that…in August.
With that being said, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s game review post…
Lately, it feels like we’re all just dinosaurs trying to avoid the falling meteors.
In this 2-4 player game, you’ll try to dodge all of life’s little disasters while tuning out your incredibly rude inner demons. You might fall into a pit of hot lava or get ghosted by your dino date. But think happy thoughts because the dino who survives it all wins the game!
Happy Little Dinosaurs takes 30-60 minutes to play and is for 2-4 players. It is recommended for ages 8+.
The box contains 97 cards, 4 Dinosaur player boards, 4 Dinosaur meeples, and 1 rule book.
Y’all, this game was so cute. It’s made by Unstable Games, which has made games like Unstable Unicorns, Here to Slay, and Wrong Party. You might also recognize the art style because this company is also connected to TeeTurtle, which makes awesome shirts and socks and plushies.
So we saw this game while walking the game aisle at Target, and decided that we just had to have it…so fast forward to an hour later as we’re pulling the game out, setting it up, and reading through the directions (and watching a quick how to play video) before playing a couple games with just the two of us.
Basically each player chooses a dinosaur: Stego, Bad News Bronto, Cry Ceratops, or Nervous Rex (for the main game; there is an expansion that brings in two other characters) and the goal is to either be the last dino standing or to be the first dino to follow the path to escape and survive all the disasters coming your way.
There are predatory disasters, natural disasters, emotional disasters, and meteors. Each dino character has bonuses or negatives that can impact their response to these disasters…such as Stego has a bonus against meteors, or Cry Ceratops has a bonus to emotional but a negative to natural.
The winner of each round of play gets to move a certain number of points farther down the escape path, based on cards played…and the loser of each round adds a disaster to their player board. But hey, at the end of each round everyone gets to move forward based on the number of disasters they’ve collected….so if you have two disasters on your board then you move forward two spaces on the escape path.
If you collect three of the same kind of disaster (predatory, natural, emotional) then you’re out…or if you collect one of each of the three, then you’re out. And a meteor card is basically like a wild card. It can act as any of the other disaster cards (so have two predatory disasters and a meteor, well that’s three of a kind and you’re out).
So there’s some strategy into which cards you play each round, and of course it can always be modified by your fellow players, which adds more excitement and complications to the gameplay.
We had a lot of fun playing it just the two of us, but we’re super excited to try playing it with our friends to see what it’s like as a four player game. We want to pick up the expansions too, because it’s fun to see what other chaos can get added with additional character and gameplay options.
Well, that is all from us for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and we’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
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