Gods Love Dinosaurs is the latest game from the designer of Magic Maze, a Spiel-nominated family game from 2017 that I still have yet to play or acquire (although I’d love to … so many games, so little time). Magic Maze is cooperative, while Gods Love Dinosaurs is competitive, but both games have simple rulesets and mechanics that make both setup and learning fairly quick processes. I’m not sure that GLD follows through on its promise, though – the game might actually be too simple, and I found it hard to get any sort of strategy or plan going as a result.
The premise of the game is that you’re trying to build out an ecosystem, placing one new tile each turn, that has six main species in it, three prey, two predators, and an apex predator in a dinosaur. The prey don’t do much except multiply; the predators in your ecosystem will move in prescribed ways and eat prey in their path, but they must eat something each turn or they’ll “go extinct” (die). Every few turns, the dinosaurs activate, eating everything in their path, predator or prey, but only when a dinosaur eats a predator do you get a bonus egg, which you can keep as a point at game-end or use to hatch another dinosaur to eat more predators and get you more points. The game ends when the tile supply is exhausted.
You draw those ecosystem tiles from a central board that has five columns, with one of each animal species (excluding dinosaurs) underneath each, and then a dinosaur meeple that will move left to right as columns are cleared. You place one tile into each column per player, but don’t refill those vacated spaces immediately. Most tiles show one animal species on them, and when you take that tile, you take a meeple (animeeple?) of that type. When a column is cleared, its associated animal is activated. For prey, that means reproduction: Each prey meeple you have spawns one more prey meeple (one assumes via parthenogenesis) into a neighboring hex as long as it’s of that species’ preferred terrain type. Predators move in a very specific pattern, with each species moving differently, and must eat at least one prey to survive, so placing your tiles and your prey becomes one of the most important decisions – I would argue the only important decision – you’ll make in the game.
The dinosaur activates if that meeple is under a column when it’s cleared, after which it slides to the right to the next column. Each dinosaur may move five hexes, in any pattern, and eats everything in its path, but it must end on a mountain hex – the one on which it started, or a different one. Each prey it eats is merely consumed, its existence a meaningless speck on the fabric of time, while each predator consumed yields an egg. If you have an empty mountain hex when dinosaurs activate, you may pay one egg and place a new dinosaur on that space.
That’s all there is to the game – the process repeats until you’ve run out of tiles, and then everyone adds up their eggs and dinosaurs, one point for each. There’s no player interaction, and in our experience it’s hard to get enough predators on the board to have many (if any) left after you have at least two dinosaurs and activate them. You can’t plan for the long or even medium term here; you just have to plan for the next dinosaur activation. That makes it sound like a kids’ game, and my daughter did like the game more than I did, but I don’t think you could play this with children under 10 or so because of some of the spatial reasoning involved in setting up the next feeding. I might be wrong about that age limit, as the box says ages 8+, but I think I’m also just not very fond of the game and may not be giving it enough credit. I’m still hoping to pick up Magic Maze in the near future, though.