Building a vibrant ecosystem capable of sustaining life is not an easy task. At least that’s what we found out after playing Gods Love Dinosaurs!
This cheeky, beautiful game will have you puzzling over the best way to design your world so that every life form can survive — that is, before they’re all eaten by the dinosaurs of course!
What is Gods Love Dinosaurs?
With its quirky title, Gods Love Dinosaurs is less about dinosaurs and more about building a flourishing ecosystem. This is an ecosystem/food chain management game where players, playing as “gods,” will place tiles to build an ecosystem inhabited by prey (frogs, rats, rabbits,) predators (Tigers, Eagles) and Dinosaurs!
Your goal is to build an ecosystem where your dinosaurs can feast and lay enough eggs to win the game. The player with the most points from eggs and hatched dinosaurs wins.
How Do You Play?
Ecosystem tiles are laid out on the Animal board that is separated in columns by the types of animals you’ll be creating in your habitat.
Each animal can only live in a specific type of habitat, so you’ll need to build a balance of all of them for life to flourish.
Every player begins the game with a starting tile with one of each prey, and a nest of three dinosaur eggs.
Tiles are played out on the animal board with a dinosaur placed at the bottom of the first column. (frogs)
Each turn, you’ll select one tile from the animal board to add to your ecosystem. Some of these tiles will give you more animals while others will just provide room for your animals to grow. When all of the tiles from a column are drafted by players, that animal activates. This means that all players simultaneously activate all animals of that type in their ecosystem. If they are prey, they expand to adjacent hexes of their habitat type. Predators activate by hunting prey in nearby hexes. And if the column that activates also happens to have the dinosaur token underneath it, then all dinosaurs activate as well.
When Dinosaurs activate, players first have the option of hatching an egg into a new dinosaur. Then the Dinosaurs all hunt. Like predators, they must eat or else it will die. A dinosaur can eat anything to survive, but only by eating predators will it lay an egg. These eggs (and living dinosaurs) are how you earn your points.
Once the dinosaur activations are over, the dinosaur moves to the next column, empty columns are refilled and the game continues.
Once there are not enough ecosystem tiles to refill the animal board, the game ends immediately. Players score 1 point for every egg in their nests and 1 point for each dinosaur in their ecosystem.
The player with the most points wins the game.
What Do We Think?
God’s Love Dinosaurs is an enjoyable tile placement game that provides a satisfying puzzle to crack. Can you build an ecosystem with enough animal life to provide your predators and apex predators enough food sources without the whole system dying out?
This straightforward challenge presented with simple, easy to learn rules is the shining part of the game for us. God’s Love Dinosaurs is incredibly easy to learn and very welcoming to new players — even those without much game experience under their belts. I love that you can learn it in a handful of minutes and get right to playing and pondering over how best to build your ecosystem.
For those who like a lot of player interaction, this is relatively limited in God’s Love Dinosaurs. The most player interaction comes from which tiles you choose to draft and when, if possible, you trigger animal activations.
While you can’t directly impact anyone else’s ecosystems, you can look around and see where everyone is in their ecosystem and use it to your advantage to either activate an animal that someone doesn’t have enough of currently to adequately repopulate their terrain, or activate dinosaurs hoping to catch your opponents without enough food sources to sustain their dinosaurs forcing them to die out and lose points.
This, for me, is enough player interaction to make the game interesting without ever making it feel mean. A must in a game like this that will most likely appeal to families.
While we really enjoy playing God’s Love Dinosaurs, I do worry about the replayability of the game. Once you feel like you’ve cracked the puzzle and know the best ways to design your ecosystem, I’m not sure how likely you are to keep coming back. While the game is good, we consider it a solid 7, maybe 8 on a scale of 10. It’s better than average, but it’s not that jaw dropping gameplay that makes me want to tell everyone to go run out and play it right this instant. We have fun playing it, but it may not be a collection keeper forever if that makes sense.
I do like it though for the educational elements subtly present in the game (more on that below) and think the balance that the ecosystem puzzle provides is well worth checking out.
Pain Points
While we enjoyed the game, there was one thing we kept hiccuping on.
The end of game scoring is very straight forward, which is nice. However, we wish there would have been a bit more points offered to players who actually hatched eggs into dinosaurs. Dinosaurs in the ecosystem and eggs in the nest are each worth 1 point. We feel however that the dinosaurs in the ecosystem should be worth a minimum of 2 points mainly because of how difficult they can be to keep alive. If you are able to manage having multiple dinosaurs in your ecosystem without having them die out, that means you are running a pretty well maintained world.
With both dinosaurs and eggs being valued the same, there isn’t a large incentive for players to hatch much more than one or two eggs. Hatching a dinosaur means running the risk of losing a point (because if you can’t feed them, they starve and die out, thus costing you a point.) So it pays for players to play it safe. I’d love if the dinosaurs were of higher value so that players were more incentivized to run the risk of hatching a dinosaur and needing to feed it so they can hopefully keep it alive to score points in the end.
In fact, if we are supposed to believe that we are gods and we really do love dinosaurs, then the game should value them a lot more to make sure players create as many as possible.
Other than that, we wouldn’t really change anything about the game. It’s a nice, simple, straightforward experience with a satisfying amount of strategy that makes it an enjoyable, challenging family game.
Theme
The ecosystem theme of Gods Love Dinosaurs is very well realized. I greatly enjoy the challenge players must manage in populating their habitats enough so that their predators can munch on prey without munching the available food sources so low that their ecosystem dies out.
Much like any ecosystem, you’ll have to find the right balance between creating habitats for your prey to populate and expand, predators to keep those populations in check so that they can repopulate again later, and having enough predators to satisfy the dinosaur population so that it too can continue to thrive.
And since your predator and dinosaurs can only travel a specific distance, you must make sure that your ecosystem remains consistent and available in all areas and not just concentrated in one location.
It is simple in theory, but you quickly find that it’s harder than it looks.
Components
This is another knock out from Pandasaurus Games in component quality.
The art throughout the game is just lovely. Lots of beautiful colors that pop while also making it easy to tell the difference between the terrain types. The tiles you’ll use are nice and sturdy and all fit together well.
Despite being quite small, the wooden animals are cut quite intricately and really elevate the play experience. It’s just fun to move them around on the board and play with them.
Importantly too, the rule book is nicely laid out making the game a breeze to learn.
How does it play with two?
Gods Love Dinosaurs plays really well at two. They have an easy way to scale the game depending on the number of players you have so the game feels the same at two as it does at three or four.
Can kids play?
Kids could definitely play Gods Love Dinosaurs if they are around that 9 or 10 age. While our younger kids could figure the game out mechanically, strategically balancing the ecosystem and making sure that you are set up well is much more difficult that the average kid 6-8 could probably manage. Our boys would eat everything in sight at the first possible chance because it’s just too tempting. (It’s tempting for adults, too!)
So while the game itself is fairly simple and family friendly, the ability to play or win on your own might be something out of reach for kids younger than 9ish.
Overall though, if you’ve got older kids nearing 10 or beyond, Gods Love Dinosaurs makes for a great family game.
Educational Elements
While it may not seem like it on the surface with its quirky title, Gods love Dinosaurs would be a great supplemental game for a science unit on ecosystems. While there isn’t any educational elements worked inherently into the game, it does a great job of illustrating the difficult balance maintaining habitats and food sources can be. If an animal is over hunted (by natural or other means) then there not only isn’t enough of that prey left to survive but it also impacts the other animals that rely on it for food sources and must then travel elsewhere to find food or else they too will die out. Everything is connected.
*cue “It’s the Ciiiiiiiiiircle of Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife” blaring during this lesson.
Summary
With simple to learn rules and a challenging puzzle, the strategy required to build a flourishing and sustainable ecosystem makes Gods Love Dinosaurs an engaging game. We love how easy it is to learn and how straightforward the scoring is which all provides a welcoming play experience that you can share with players of almost any age or skill level.
While we worry about the long term replayability of the game, from its great table presence and components to its light yet tricky feel, Gods Love Dinosaurs has plenty going for it to make this one worth checking out.
If you are a fan of tile placement and drafting games, are looking for that next step into the board game world, or enjoy games where you’re responsible for building and planning things that will work together, Gods Love Dinosaurs could be a great fit for you!
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A special thank you to our friends at Pandasaurus Games for sending us a copy of Gods Love Dinosaurs for review. As always, our thoughts and opinions are our own.
Game Info:
Title: Gods Love Dinosaurs
2 to 5 Players Ages 10+
Designer: Kasper Lapp
Artist: Stevo Torres
Publisher: Pandasaurus Games
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