Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
We Got Played #3: Duelosaur Island!
0 Plays2 seconds ago
Today on We Got Played, we channel our inner Spielberg and play a game about making our very own dinosaur park: Duelosaur Isand! We're big fans of the theme, so does the game live up to it? Tune in to find out!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Dulasaur Island
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello, this is Isaac. This is Jesse. And we got played. Today we got played Dulasaur Island. Life finds a way, but did the designers?
00:00:28
Speaker
Let's tell you a little bit about how to play Dulasaur
Background and Comparison with Dinosaur Island
00:00:30
Speaker
Island. um But before we do, a little bit about the game. Dulasaur Island is from designer Ian Moss, who was the developer on the previous game Dinosaur Island, designed by Jonathan Gilmore and Brian Lewis.
00:00:44
Speaker
Now, ah Dinosaur Island is a game I really enjoyed and I guess so did BoardGameGeek. It's a 7.5, came out in 2017, it was a big Kickstarter. I know my box is jammed full of like pink plastic dinosaurs, it's great.
00:00:58
Speaker
And it was um a really well done, kind of two hour mid-weight euro in which you got to relive Jurassic Park. And Dulasaur Island is its little sibling, came out a year later in 2018.
00:01:12
Speaker
And it carries a lot of the same concepts forward from Dinosaur Island into this two-player smaller format that you can ostensibly play in 30 to 60 minutes. And these are from Pandasaurus Games, a publisher that really has an eclectic and wide catalog. They swing a lot.
00:01:32
Speaker
They miss a lot, but they also hit a fair amount. And so we were excited given the warm reception that Dulasaur Island had received. We were excited to check this one out.
Gameplay Overview
00:01:44
Speaker
Quickly, how you play Dulasaur Island. So this is a drafting game. You're building dinosaurs out of DNA. DNA is your basic resource.
00:01:55
Speaker
And so at the start of the turn, we're going to roll some dice and they're gonna show you some DNA resources. And you're also gonna pair these dice to a set of counters that show some additional bonuses, a little bit of money, maybe a victory point, maybe another kind of DNA. So you're gonna kinda do this pairing of dice to fix rewards.
00:02:19
Speaker
and then ah you'll draft these dice. You can also draft one of the two sponsor cards that'll be in play and the sponsors will modify the game in different ways, give you bonuses for certain activities or give you um extra powers.
00:02:34
Speaker
But basically you're going back and forth drafting these dice and sponsors and then you're going to go ahead and build. Now you're not just building dinosaurs, each card is multi-use.
00:02:46
Speaker
So you've got dinosaurs on the top and on the bottom you've got three different kinds of attractions. There are rides, roller coaster icon, we'll probably call them roller coasters throughout the show. yeah There's merch, so t-shirt icon, and there is concessions or food.
00:03:07
Speaker
and These work each of them slightly differently food is going to increase your income every turn ah Merch is going to increase the number of cards you're allowed to draw each turn and again these are the cards that have dinosaurs and shops on them and Rollercoaster is going to give you this one-time bonus related to a whole different part of the game the PR track so After you do your drafting, draft your dice, draft your sponsor cards, you're going to now go ahead and build cards out of your hand, and whether those are dinosaurs or those are shops, and then you're going to go ahead and score points. Now points here are visitors, that's how it's themed, and the way that points are generated is that your dinosaurs have an excitement rating.
00:03:54
Speaker
the more exciting your dinosaurs are, the more people want to come. So if you have an exciting, like a three excitement dinosaur, actually, i don't think there are. i think they're all two, four, and six. or yeah two and No, they're all one, two, and three. They're all one, two, and three.
00:04:08
Speaker
They're two, four, and six for end game victory points. Oh, that's correct. Yes. So one, two, and three, which means if you put down ah a three excitement dinosaur, like a Mega Rex, you're going to pick up three new visitors at the end of every turn in the in the in the final scoring for the turn. And then you'll start again with an income phase. You'll get your money, you'll get to draw some cards, there's a shared display, you can spend a dollar to refresh it, all the usual tropes.
00:04:35
Speaker
um But that's pretty much what you were doing in Dulasaur Island.
Disappointment with Extreme Edition Components
00:04:40
Speaker
By the way, we got to play the Extreme Edition, which had, i think, a replacement component. So instead of a plastic counter for one of the instead of a cardboard counter, we got a plastic counter.
00:04:52
Speaker
Yes. I think we got an extra sponsor card. i mean Maybe. Honestly, yeah. It was a relatively disappointing Extreme Edition. But nevertheless...
00:05:03
Speaker
ah Jesse. Yes. Tell me something. Surely there was something you liked about Dulasaur Island. I liked the theme. That's kind of why we chose it. We've been on on kind of a zoo kick. We played Ark Nova. We played Sanctuary. We like this theme of building parks and animal enclosures and so forth. So like the theme. Yes.
00:05:31
Speaker
did Did you feel like it was well represented in the game? Not really. No. Well, what else could we say positive about the game? Maybe um the dice are lovely.
00:05:42
Speaker
Yes, the dice are very good quality. They're this nice translucent yellow. And they're also very big. They feel very good to hold. they're They've got good weight to them. They're the kind of dice that you imagine a T-Rex rolling. Yeah, exactly. They're chunky.
00:05:55
Speaker
Right, but it fit for its tiny hands. And we did get dual layer boards, right? So that was nice for keeping our cubes in place because you track all your DNA because you've got six different kinds of DNA. And so you have cubes to track how much you have on these tracks that are dual layered so I can track things on my tracks when I have as many tracks as we have in this game. Which is many tracks. I couldn't keep track. But only the personal boards are dual layered. The ones in the middle, the other trackers, are not double layered.
00:06:24
Speaker
Right, so if you're getting too far ahead of me in excitement or in visitors, I can just knock knock over and just nudge it a little. Right, quote-unquote accidentally. And reset things to, I think, where they were.
Theme and Component Quality Critique
00:06:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. We're struggling a little to say much that we liked about the game because we really struggled to enjoy the game. I mean, there were a couple of good puns in there.
00:06:49
Speaker
I do remember what there was a... Clever Grill is one of the food attractions that you can get. That's that's a fun one. I like the Clever Grill, yeah. ah there There were some turkeys in there, like ah the Dien Nachos, which, you know, I'm a trained vocal professional, and even I can't make N-A sound like nachos. Acronyms are not pronouncing-ins.
00:07:16
Speaker
Anyway... we We like the people involved in designing the game. i mean, Ian is a nice person. John and Brian are friends. like i don't i don't I do feel um a little guilty about what we're about to do because it's time for us to talk about what went less well in Dulasaur Island, the extreme edition.
00:07:41
Speaker
Yeah. Jesse, you want to kick us off? give a Pick the part that really ground your gears. I think that the part that that really made me frustrated and the part that I think most of our criticisms are going to come back to is the incredibly loose economy.
Criticism of Game Economy
00:07:58
Speaker
Everything here functions on either with the attractions, it functions with money, you get coins, and with the dinosaurs, it functions on DNA. and yet there's really no shortage of any of those resources throughout the entire game so it doesn't ever feel like there's a decision when it comes to resource management and especially when your hand limit is like three cards per turn you're basically just playing the cards that you have very procedurally it's just very uncreative in the way that you can play the game
00:08:31
Speaker
Yeah, I had the same reaction. it felt like the game, once we got past you know turns two or three and we got a little bit of an economy going, the game sort of felt like I get dealt three cards in my income phase.
00:08:44
Speaker
i get, I $6, $8, $9, whatever it i match the the cards right so I sort of look at the cards and say what DNA can I get versus how much money do I have so am I gonna build one dinosaur in one shop which is the dinosaur which is the shop probably gonna use that third card for one thing or another I might use it because I need to discard it to mix DNA a different way or maybe I'll even get to build two shops this turn whoa but it's basically like
00:09:16
Speaker
Right up front, you map out how you're going to use these three cards, and then you use them.
Lack of Depth in Card Drafting and Play
00:09:21
Speaker
And then you move things up and down tracks to reflect what you've done. spent, by the way, the colors, my goodness, the colors. I spent a lavender DNA, a pink DNA, and a purple DNA.
00:09:35
Speaker
Those are the basic DNAs, but I didn't spend a green, yellow, or red advanced DNA because I was building like a loser dinosaur, like a Parasaurolophus or a Pachycephalosaur. Nothing cool, nothing with spikes or spines or big teeth or claws.
00:09:51
Speaker
For that, you need advanced DNA. Of course. Which very, very difficult to get because you can only get it by drafting the dice or if not drafting the dice, then you can discard a card and spend two basic DNA to get that advanced DNA and Or at the end of a turn, you can also just get an advanced DNA if you're far enough in the game or, you know, all these other things. Probably one of your sponsor cards is good at making advanced DNA. my I had sponsor cards were good at making advanced DNA the whole time. Yeah, so just this loose economy means, oh, here are the cards I got.
00:10:21
Speaker
Now, in a duel game, the cards that you get can be pretty important. I
Frustration over Dinosaur Variety
00:10:26
Speaker
certainly remember you kind of slapping me around with card choice in our previous duel experience. Yes. Seven Wonders, fellowship of the ring the Lord of the Rings duel. Yeah. Right, where you were constantly forcing me into these terrible choices.
00:10:43
Speaker
I felt pretty good about that. This is our relationship, folks. So in this one, that didn't come out very much. And and so what what do you think that was? why Why was the card drafting part of this so flat?
00:11:00
Speaker
Well, I think most of the card drafting part of this was actually setting up the draft. The draft itself doesn't take very long, and there are very few actual decisions in it. No, no, but before we get to the cube drafting, let's just stick to the cards. Oh, the cards. Yeah, like the the actual cards, right? Because...
00:11:17
Speaker
We were saying, you get three cards and you just do the thing that you do with three cards. But, like, shouldn't that matter a lot? I mean, what are those cards? The thing is, you play the cards into your own personal tableau that the other person can't impact. So there's really nothing that you gain from like, the plans that you make to use the cards in this exact way that you plan to use them do not change from the beginning of the turn to the end of the turn. And there's not really much the opponent can do about that.
00:11:48
Speaker
um So that's I think a really good point, right? So it's your tableau your tableau is um racing toward your tableau. It's not like your card selection is enabling you to race towards some goal, right? That if I get there first, I get something better than you. It's not like it puts any pressure on, right? There's not like an instant win condition that if you get that dinosaur, then boom, the game is over, right? There's not some of that tension ah that comes from those cards being interactive. I'm just making my park better than your park or, or I don't know, good at all.
Security Mechanism Critique
00:12:26
Speaker
Right.
00:12:27
Speaker
And so i think that was one issue. The other issue, though, is that For a game that's ostensibly about dinosaurs, of which we know of tens of thousands of species, right? like there's i was listening to a podcast just the other day. It's ah Melvin Bragg's show. this is Okay, we're we're taking a little digression, but this is wonderful, wonderful podcast that has recently come to an end after like a 30-year called In Our Time with Melvin Bragg. And so I was listening to one of his favorite episodes having just announced his retirement. They were doing this sort of like, let's check out, you know, Melvin's top 10 episodes or whatever. And this one was on dinosaurs. And it turns out that we are discovering a new dinosaur species roughly once a week.
00:13:18
Speaker
Once a week. So we are getting 50 new species a year. That variety was not reflected in the cards of Dulasaur Island because really there were three kinds of dinosaurs. yeah There were dinosaurs that were one excitement and two endgame victory points and one threat.
00:13:42
Speaker
whoa There were dinosaurs that were two excitement and four victory points and two threat. And there were dinosaurs that were three excitement, six victory points, and three threat. Oh my gosh.
00:14:02
Speaker
There are three dinosaurs in the game. That's it. You could put different names on them. The art is lovely. Peter Woken is a fantastic illustrator. Quan Chi Mori is great too. But like, there are three dinosaurs. There are only three dinosaurs.
00:14:16
Speaker
And then they're paired with like something like six shops. There's the big roller coaster and the little roller coaster. There's the Dino Nuggets place and the Dien Nachos place. And there's the t-shirt place and the, I don't know, full ballroom regalia. it's It was so frustrating because you can't deny someone something If there's only one thing.
00:14:43
Speaker
Right? it's like It's like going to the Chevy dealership and being like, I am going to prevent anybody from buying a Chevy by buying all these Chevys.
00:14:54
Speaker
And in the back they're like, we got a couple more Chevys. You know, there's... So... Who cares if I took that GIGASAURUS SPINOREX that they made up for the game? Right.
Threat Level and Security Integration Issues
00:15:08
Speaker
Because Jesse spends a buck, flops three new cards, and sure enough, there's a SPINOMEGAREX in there.
00:15:17
Speaker
So, you know, i can't even bother fighting you over those things because they're all commodities. Yeah, I totally agree. And I just think if you've made a game where you're playing this huge, really important dinosaur, like I played the T-Rex and it completely loses all meaning and it's not an exciting play.
00:15:41
Speaker
I feel like you need to reassess your priorities on that. Yeah, I totally agree, right? If you have a dinosaur game and you don't win when you play the T-Rex, maybe that's more of like ah a card game thing, you're trying to play the T-Rex, but like, you know, you want the cool dinosaurs that people love to feel good when they're played, to feel interesting when they're played, to...
00:16:04
Speaker
reflect the diversity and the interest that we all have in dinosaurs. um And by the way, you know this game ostensibly is about how exciting dinosaurs are, right? You play them because they have an excitement level, which is going to generate victory points, which are visitors, to be clear. But their icons are stars. Yes. Well, all the people who showed up to the park, they were stars in my book. Yeah.
00:16:31
Speaker
No, so it is that theming kind of falls apart, but but there is this one bit that you really need to get right if you're going to do a Jurassic Park but non-infringing, right? Which is that dinosaurs dangerous and you're evil corporations, and we are evil corporations, but, you know...
00:16:54
Speaker
there needs to be that cynicism and that satire of dinosaurs breaking out and eating visitors. Right. And the way that that's expressed in this game is that there are dinosaurs and they have a threat level. And if their threat level exceeds your security level, then they will break out, which is represented by losing two victory points.
00:17:14
Speaker
So losing two victory points is not great. Nobody wants to lose two victory points of the like 90 that you win with.
Game Length and Duel Experience
00:17:22
Speaker
Right. But, right, two victory points. And it's not, I should, it's two victory points per difference between your security level and your threat level.
00:17:34
Speaker
Right? So if you have a threat of six and a security of two, you will actually lose eight points. Right. um And, you know, maybe that would work better. in any way, interestingly, if security was a bit more of a developed mechanism. Because, you know, i could imagine having some mechanisms around, like, getting good security guards or upgraded paddocks or alarm systems. Or, like, you could imagine a richer system.
00:18:02
Speaker
But the way it actually works is... You pay $1 initially to upgrade your security and then $2. And then when you get to the next level of security, it costs $3.
00:18:17
Speaker
Tell me there's more. Oh, don't worry. The next level of security, $4. four dollars Okay. Now let me guess. The level after that is going to be $5, right? There's no level after that. It's all $4. So it's just $4. $4 for the rest of the game forever.
00:18:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's the entire mechanism right there. And you just got to pay. So in other words, what it's really just doing is saying implicitly dinosaurs cost not just DNA, but a few more dollars.
00:18:45
Speaker
Yeah. And just the way that it's set up, it feels like that threat level is intended to bottleneck the number of cards you can actually play, the number of dinosaurs that you get to play.
00:18:56
Speaker
But then you get so many resources that it feels like you have so much extra that you could be playing dinosaurs with, but you can't because everything from the hand limit to this threat system is trying to stop you from playing dinosaurs.
00:19:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's like here's a loose and slushy economy governed by some fencing that makes sure that the game lasts for at least 30 minutes. Right. Which is probably 26 minutes too long.
00:19:24
Speaker
it really i you know We've played a bunch of games, and and we have mucked some games midway through going, this
PR Track as a Balancing Mechanism?
00:19:30
Speaker
isn't worth our time. But I remember reading the rules and kind of looking at you, and by turn two, we were both in agreement. So, you know, you can play this, ah the long game or the short game or the medium game, and we thought we'd go with the medium game. And I i should have. Two turns in, I should have been like, let's go short game. Let's make this... It just didn't do anything. It wasn't a duel. It wasn't exciting. It didn't feel like dinosaurs. It didn't even feel like managing a Euro park. You know, it was just get some cards.
00:20:04
Speaker
play them on top of your board or on bottom of your board, pay the relevant dollars and DNA and do it again until somebody had enough points to win in in just the driest, driest possible way.
00:20:19
Speaker
There was this one mechanism that felt like it might be exciting, and I remember reading it and thinking, oh, that's kind of clever. So this is the rubber band. this is In a dual game, it's very important that you have a rubber band.
00:20:32
Speaker
Because you either need a rubber band or you need a way to terminate early. Because nobody wants to be in a 12 turn game where the game's over by turn 4, but everyone's got to slog through. Okay, so here's how they did it.
00:20:44
Speaker
You've got this PR track, and it has rewards on it. And it grows, so the words the rewards increase as you go from left to right. and ah the player who is behind at the end of the round gets to select any reward on this track that you've already passed, right, that the marker that ticks by round by round has already crossed.
00:21:11
Speaker
And then the following player gets to also select a PR reward, but they have to select one that's poorer than the one their opponent chose.
00:21:24
Speaker
So that's kind of cool, right? You're getting a little bit more income, a little bit more treat into your economy, which you probably don't need to find. But one player can, in a way, put the screws to the other player, right? And and choose rewards that are less generous so that the other player is put even further back. And that seemed really, really, really interesting, and I thought that would be cool until in turn two, I got a sponsor card that said,
00:21:51
Speaker
You can choose any your reward. You are not restricted by what the other player chose. And it was like a don't play this game card. was like, here's this mechanism that you now get to ignore in a really not fun way.
Summary of Disappointment
00:22:06
Speaker
I always bring this up with Guillotine. Guillotine has a card like this where it's all about manipulating the order in which people are going get their heads chopped off. But then there's like a card that freezes the order.
00:22:18
Speaker
And it's the card that's like, don't play this game card. Right. So, you know, and I don't want to go too crazy. The sponsors probably were the best part of the game. They were at least of reasonable variety. They impacted the game interestingly. They were not useless. Like, if their power didn't work for you, you could discard them for some bonus. Like, they were reasonably well designed, but...
00:22:41
Speaker
You know, just another place where the game is telling you this is going to be interesting, there's going to be a push and pull, we're going to react to one another, we're going to kind of put each other into difficult situations, but no, we're actually just going to get everything we want and need, and we're going to put a lot of cards down on the table that are all one of three dinosaurs.
00:23:02
Speaker
Yeah, and it's it it really, especially when the card that broke that mechanic went to the player that was pretty much predestined to win, that was is not a fun experience.
00:23:14
Speaker
Yeah, you know, this... ah is kind of disappointing because i really did love Dinosaur Island and I remember playing it several times and played it with different groups, more advanced groups, less advanced groups. I played it with a group of relative beginners to board gaming and they loved it I mean, absolutely loved it. And Dinosaur Island does have so many similarities. I mean, that core engine is all the same.
00:23:42
Speaker
But just um kind of kind of a flop. I mean, you know, and just tired. yeah You know, it feels like um whatever magic existed in Dinosaur Island by the time we got to Dulasaur Island had fossilized.
Conclusion and Listener Feedback
00:24:04
Speaker
So how many visitors would you give Dulasaur Island? Well, I mean, I wouldn't encourage anyone to visit Dulasaur Island. But if you're asking me how I would rate Dulasaur Island on on a visitor scale, um I think I would rate it, I don't know, 48 visitors of which 23 were eaten.
00:24:24
Speaker
I might give it a three because it'd be fun to have see a couple get eaten. Well, folks, I think that's going to do it for us. Duel of Sword Island, ah we got played.
00:24:36
Speaker
We definitely, definitely got played. See you next time. Do you have any questions or comments about this episode? Do you know something that we didn't say or know that something we said is false?
00:24:50
Speaker
Do you have a fun fact that you desperately want to share but can't find a way to bring it up in conversation naturally? Send it to us at feedback at wegotplayed.games.
00:25:03
Speaker
That's feedback at wegotplayed.games. Thank you for listening.