Review - Jurassic Wars

Today I'm having a look at yet another impulse purchase; a cheap travel card game called Jurassic Wars. The game features dinosaur cards which fight each other until one player has no cards left.  It feels like you're playing a more advanced version of Top Trumps.

The game comes in a small, but sturdy box, which is labelled as a 'dice arena', but it's just a box really.  The box contains a rules booklet, 7 dice and 33 cards.  The rules booklet is in black and white and is 8 pages long.  The rules are clearly and concisely written and we had no issues with understanding how it was to work.  You get 7 6-sided dice, 4 green (for the herbivores) and 3 red (for the carnivores), the green ones have 2 faces with stars and the red ones 3 faces with stars.  It's a nice little touch that they did special dice, ordinary D6's would have worked just as well, but simplifies the process a bit and makes the game more accessible.  Then finally what you're really paying for is the cards, they're standard playing card sized and seem to be of reasonable quality.  One thing I'm really impressed with is the artwork on the cards each dinosaur has been brilliantly rendered , if I'd have had these as a kid I've have spent hours just looking at the pictures.

Gameplay is a series of one on one dinosaur combats, which sees players rolling the number and type of dice shown on the dino's card and the player with the most stars wins that round and either reduces the opponents dice or kills him if there are no dice left to remove.  Play keeps going until only one player has no dinosaurs left.  Tactics revolve around which order to play your cards and when to play your limited supply of combat cards (that have various affects on the dice).

I think it works best as a two-player game really, and if you have the full 5 players there's going to be a bit to much waiting for your turn.  There's only so much depth in the basic game, but there's already a bunch of extra rules on the website which add that extra depth to the game and includes a couple of new ways to play too.

In my introduction I labelled this as a travel game, but that's not really fair, whilst it is suitable as a travel game due to its small size, we've been having lots of fun with this at home on the dinning room table.

In conclusion this is a great little game, inexpensive, good mechanics, suitable for players of different levels and with a great theme as well.  Highly recommended!