Dave Reviews: Mel Kiper's Dino Derby

Draftosaurus

Draftosaurus is a sweet little dinosaur-based game from the mind of Antoine Bauza, creator of Ghost Stories and Samurai Spirit...

...oh god, what happens to the dinos? What happens to us?!

Although the guy on the cover with the selfie stick definitely deserves to be eaten by the roaring T-Rex behind him, nothing so brutal happens in Draftosaurus. It's just about the simplest game you could imagine with Bauza's name on it, which means it's simple enough until you hit that "oh shit" moment where you realize you have entirely borked your strategy.

Draftosaurus has a game board for each player and a bag of dinos for everyone to use. At the start, everyone gets six dinos, which they keep hidden from everyone else. One player rolls a die to determine where people have to place one of their dinos. The trick is that the player who rolls doesn't have to follow the rule. For example, most of the potential die rolls limit you to placing your dino on one half of the board or the other (they're split in different ways, so there's left half/right half, and also forest/dirt, which comprise different groups of dino pens). The main benefit is obvious, but you can also play around it if you pay attention to when your turn to roll is coming up. If it's at the end of the round, you might be able to play a dino in a spot where only one fits because you'll be able to place the next one anywhere, whereas if someone else was rolling that might be a riskier play.

Once you play a dino, you take all your remaining dinos and pass them to the left, thus the "Draftosaurus" name. Every pen scores points in different ways. True to a Bauza game, your goal is to maximize how many points each dino earns, and all the pens are pretty close in terms of what's possible. The easy pen to fill is the Woody Trio, where you only need three dinos of any type, earns you seven points if you fill it—2.33 points per dino. The Forest of Sameness, on the other hand, requires all dinos to be the same type. (This is harder in some games, depending on the number of players, because that affects how many dinos of each type are used.) If you can fill all six slots, you earn twenty-four points, or four per dino. That's obviously much better, but rarely does it happen. Four will earn twelve points, which is still three per dino, better than the Woody Trio. But if you only land one or two, they're worth less.

Oh, and if you put some in the Woody Trio pen but don't get all three, they're not worth anything. Oops!

Basically, you have to commit to getting as many points as you can in the pens where you put anything, which can of course be thwarted by bad die rolls or other people taking the dinos you need before they can circle the table to you. You have control over your ability to see how many of each dino you start with and how many of each type other players use, so you can figure out which pens you're likely to be able to use well, but there are aspects of luck and people playing keepaway which are out of your control. On the plus side, the game plays very quickly, so if everyone's having fun it's quite easy to play several games if you so choose.

Draftosaurus is perfectly good filler. Few people will come over just to play it, but it's something to throw down while waiting for everyone to get to the house. It's also good for a very casual type of night. Most people can have a few of these in their collections, so if you need a quick and easy game, check it out.

Score: 7/10