My kids love games. Board games, d20 games, video games. All kinds. So, it should come as no surprise that this Christmas my tree was packed full of games. My kids were lucky enough to get a Nintendo Switch from their uncle this year, so both my son and daughter spent the first few days trying out their new video games. Let’s Go Eevee
We spent a few days this week opening up the new games, learning how to play them — which is technically me learning how to play them and then teaching them to everyone else — and taking each one for a whirl.
Hatchimals Eggventure Game
Bananagrams
Jumanji
My son isn’t partial to the original Jumanji 
Which brings me to the actual point of this blog. Two of the games we picked up weren’t geared at young kids at all. They were aimed at an older audience. And honestly? Both were awesome!
First up? Bunny Kingdom.
Bunny Kingdom
Luckily, our hunch was right and it turned out to be a lot of fun.
Bunny Kingdom
spaces on the map feature settlements and resources that players can claim. Settlements contain castles, while resources allow you to collect wood, carrots, and fish. Unfortunately, our board had suffered damage in two places despite having a seemingly undamaged box. Not what you want to see when you’ve paid a good chunk of change for a new board game!
Each player has a pile of tiny rabbit tokens they can use to claim their territory on the board, and act as their token on the scoreboard. In addition to the player tokens and board, this game comes with three different sized castles (level 1, 2, and 3), corner markers to denote special upgrades and camps that you can add onto spaces, and a massive deck of cards. Seriously massive! You’ll have to split it into a few piles just to shuffle it. The art throughout the board, cards, and box is consistently wonderful. It’s bright, colourful, and cartoony in all the best ways. My daughter repeatedly shrieked in glee, exclaimed “AUW! CUTIES!”, and hugged cards to her chest, so it’s clearly a winner in her opinion! Haha.
The premise of the game is simple. Your great Bunny King has ordered you to lead your clan of rabbits in gathering resources, claiming some land, and establishing new settlements. The rabbit with the most prosperous fief — determined by having the most golden carrots — wins.
So how do you play? For starters, you select your rabbit colour, place one of them on the 0 on the scoreboard, and deal out ten cards to each player. You draft cards from the hand, selecting two you want to keep for yourself, then pass the rest on to the next player. You play some of the card types and set the others aside for later. Then you proceed with the draft. This continues until there are no more cards in hand. Cards can do a few things, but the most important ones are labelled with a letter and a number — coordinates referring to a space on the board. If you select a card like this you get to place a rabbit token there and claim the space as your own. Other cards include camps (which let you claim any unclaimed space until someone claims it with the proper card), settlements (which let you build castles of various levels on your claimed territory), sky towers (which let you connect two distant parts of your fief), resources (which let you collect resources like wood, mushrooms, and iron from your land), treasures (which give you golden carrots), and missions (which give you bonus golden carrots at the end of the game as long as you meet the requirements stated on the card). After the cards are drafted you enter the ‘Build Phase.’ This is when you play all of the castle cards, camps, sky towers, and resources you’ve drafted. After this you earn points (golden carrots) for how prosperous your fiefs are, which is based on number of ‘towers’ on the castles within your connected territories, and the different types of resources they can create. Once points are tallied you’ve reach an end of a round. Then you deal out another ten cards to each player and begin another draft. The game ends after four rounds of gameplay. Then you reveal the treasures and missions you’ve acquired, gaining extra golden carrots for them as appropriate. The winner is the rabbit with the most golden carrots (the highest score).
Our first game took us about an hour to play, but all the other games took up around 40 minutes, which is about how long the game is expected to run. Because the game always lasts four rounds, you can expect this to be a pretty consistent time. Which is really nice!
Bunny Kingdom is a relatively fast paced game that involves some strategy, but doesn’t take up an entire afternoon or a whole day just to play it. Selecting the proper territory is important. You want to grow the size of your fiefs and ensure they connect, but you also want to establish cities and ensure there’s a variety of resources within it’s borders. Knowing which to go for at which times is both a matter of chance, and practise. After playing a round you’ll figure out what’s most important to you. Claiming any territory that already has a castle on it is sound, as is claiming any cards that let you establish resources — or luxury resources — in territories of your choosing. In the first two rounds you won’t earn many golden carrots from your fiefs, but if you build it properly you’ll make a lot in the last two rounds. Treasures are nice, but they offer a small one time payout. Not always worth it. Missions offer a bigger payout, but are sometimes difficult to achieve. They require you invest time in accomplishing them. For example, a mission that promises you one golden carrot per territory you own that can produce wood is nice. But, if you focus on that too much you won’t have a variety of resources available in your fiefs. And it’s variety that earns you golden carrots.
My daughter caught onto the game right away, and had great fun building her kingdoms. She, myself, and my husband all did pretty well. Some games she lagged behind the adults, but others she did just as well or better. Luck played a bit of a factor. So did my daughter’s habit of occasionally selecting cards just because they’re cute. Haha. My son, however, decided that building fiefs takes too much work. Instead he spent the entire first game only taking treasures and missions. We all thought he was crazy! Turns out in the end he went from 0 golden carrots all the way to 147 golden carrots. More than enough to score him a win against my husband’s 116. We were shocked, to say the least. Apparently, taking all the treasures and not bothering with that whole kingdom thing is a decent strategy — as long as you’re the only one who tries it. If too many players go this route it won’t lead to victory.
So, when we played our follow up games, we worked on our kingdoms, took some snazzy treasures and missions, and my son — once again — took every treasure and mission he could get his hands on. This time we thought we had him on the ropes! …And he won again.
*face palm*
I guess we should have taken even more of those treasures… Haha.
Aside from this flaw it was a great game. Of course, it was a rather large flaw. Why should the one person who didn’t bother to even try building a kingdom win a kingdom building game?!? But, we had a lot of fun anyway. Overall, we all thought it was a blast! It’s definitely going to see regular play.
But, our favourite game of the holidays had nothing to do with cute fluffy rabbits. Instead, it featured people-eating dinosaurs! Yes!
Dinosaur Island
We found it on the shelf at another local game shop, Fusion Gaming, and nearly gagged at the price tag. And then we read the box. My husband traded in some Magic cards for the game, and we brought it home for my son for Christmas. It’s a heavy square box packed full of stuff. There’s lots of boards, pieces, dice, cards, and pop-outs of all kinds in this game, which is frankly a little bewildering at first. But, once you’ve got everything popped out and sorted into the many little storage baggies the game comes with (thank goodness!) you can open up the rulebook and try to figure out what the heck you’re supposed to do. Which is hard! Haha. I had to flip back and forth between the first few pages of the rulebook to set everything up — some pages were telling me how to set up the game, and others were telling me the names of types of pieces. All very important! Once I had everything properly set up — which took me around twenty minutes — I finally flipped the page on the rulebook and started to actually read how to play. It didn’t take too long to read, and there were some very useful gameplay examples for each step that helped me figure things out. But, it was still quite complicated. I had to read and reread each step and its example a few times while referencing the board and the list of piece names. Once I figured out a step I moved on, and then by the time I hit the end of a phase description I went back and read that whole phase over again. Anyway, by the time I finished making sense of the rulebook I was confident I understood how the game worked and could teach it to my family, but that I would still need to reference the rulebook for details on most of the gameplay choices the first time we played through. And I was right! I referenced that rulebook constantly during the first game and still made quite a few mistakes. I used it a lot during the second game (so that we find and correct our mistakes from the first play through), and then in the third and fourth game I only had to reference it a few times to double check a rule or a cost for something we hadn’t come across much yet.
In summary, it was hard to learn. This is a bit of a problem since the game is listed as ages eight and up. Eight! In my opinion, this game is too complex for eight year olds. They can play if they’re joining in with the grown ups or teenagers — like mine did — but its not the kind of game you could give to some eight year olds and expect them to be able to learn and play properly. Twelve and up would be more accurate.
That said, the game was awesome.
Everyone had a blast and, surprisingly, my daughter and husband loved it most of all. In fact, they were both the driving factor in us playing it so many times over the last few days. Which is huge! My daughter is always ready to play a board game, but my husband? Not so much. This is particularly surprising when you take into account how long this game takes to play. It says it takes an hour and a half to two hours to play through, but it took us over three on our first run through (and we played the ‘short game’). Further run throughs also took around three hours each, although the second time we played a ‘medium game’ and the third we played a ‘long game’ with three people instead of four. Definitely a time investment!
So what is Dinosaur Island, and how do you play?
The point of Dinosaur Island is to create the most successful park. Your park’s success is measured in Victory Points, which are most often earned by having guests survive their trip to your park. You can also earn Victory Points by creating dinosaurs and by building some attractions. A number of guests visit your park each turn based on your parks Excitement level, which is also influenced by the number and grandeur of the dinosaurs you have created, and by some attractions. But, getting people to your park isn’t all that matters. You also have to have attractions for them to visit. They’ll visit your dinosaurs, of course, but only so many visitors can view a paddock at a time, so you’ll also want to create other attractions. Things like restaurants and rides for the guests to visit. Another factor you need to take into account is danger. You can have a lot of dinosaurs and a huge excitement level, but if you haven’t invested enough in security then your guests will get eaten by dinosaurs. And dead guests don’t earn you Victory Points!
It’s a complex game that involves multiple phases, each of which allows you to make decisions regarding how you choose to run your park. We didn’t find a single obvious method for best increasing your Victory Points. Which is great! You have a lot of choices to make, and all of them are helpful in different ways. Usually you’ll need to change your priorities from round to round to do well in this game. There was a lot of fun strategy and planning involved, which even got my daughter taking the time to sit, think, plan, count, and envision a few stages and turns ahead. Fun planning, too. Not boring. We all really enjoyed this games layered complexity.
So what are these phases?
Phase One is the Research Phase, which will utilize a shared board that will be in the middle of the table. On it you’ll find dice (which usually show DNA in various types, amounts, and a threat level), dinosaur cards, and some other open spaces. During this phase each player will take turns selecting how you want your three scientists to prioritize their research. They can select one of the dinosaur cards in order to learn the DNA recipe for that dinosaur, they can select a DNA dice in order to collect that kind of DNA, they can work to increase your cold storage (which is the maximum levels of each type of DNA you can hold), or they can refrain from doing research and instead become an extra worker for the third phase. All of these options are really important. Dinosaurs raise excitement levels which in turn draw in guests, but they each cost different kinds of DNA. Collecting DNA to create them is important. Of course, your cold storage starts off small, so you’ll want to increase it as you play.
Phase Two is the Market Phase, which will utilize a shared board that will be in the middle of the table. On it you’ll find a variety of DNA, lab upgrades and park attractions you can purchase, and specialist workers you can hire. During this phase each player takes a turn selecting what they want to purchase, until each player has bought two things.
Phase Three is the Worker Phase, which will utilize a personal board which will be in front of you. On it you’ll find your DNA Cold Storage and your current levels of DNA, your current threat level, your current security level, as well as your current lab facilities and upgrades. During this phase you place your workers (typically you have four) on your board to accomplish certain tasks. Tasks can include refining DNA from one type to another advanced type, creating dinosaurs, increasing security measures, increasing paddock capacity, and raising capital. In addition, some lab upgrades will give you more options, or allow you to perform tasks with less workers invested in them, or at a financial discount. Once everyone has placed their personal workers (which happens all at the same time) you tell your fellow players what your workers are doing and apply it.
Phase Four is the Park Phase, which will utilize a personal board which will be in front of you. On it you’ll find you park, your current dinosaurs and paddock capacities, your attractions, and the number of guests which can visit each location. During the Park Phase you count up your Excitement which determines how many guests visit your park, receive income from entry fees (except for those pesky hooligans who sneak inside!), place guests at attractions, calculate threat against your security, see if any dinosaurs escape, have dinosaurs devour guests, and finally count up how many surviving guests you retain, which will grant you Victory Points.
Phase Five is the Cleanup Phase, which is when you tidy up the boards and prepare them for the next round. It’s also when you determine the next round’s turn order. Whoever has the most Victory Points goes last, while the least goes first. And then its onto the next round, with Phase One.
There’s a lot more to this game than we’ve mentioned. Plot Twist Cards help make every game different, and objective cards determine the goals you need to accomplish in order to end the game. These goals are sorted by game length, so if you want a short game you select objectives at random from the short game deck, while a long game will require cards drawn from the long game deck.
We absolutely loved this game. So much, in fact, that my husband is considering buying my son the expansion for his birthday gift. The expansion, called Dinosaur Island: Totally Liquid, allows for a fifth player to join in the fun, features water dinosaurs, more DNA dice, new attractions, and more. Super cool!
All in all, we’re thrilled with our new games.
Think you know of a game we’ll love? Let us know in the comments! I’d love to hear it!
GAME ON!
Jessica
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. He’s a bombastic GM, a rules guru, and a creator of exciting content and original adventures. Sunburst Games is proud to have him as our Founder and Lead Developer!
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as a print copy from Amazon.ca
d20 Diaries 