Dino Survival
2024
Designed by David Hills
Published by (Self-Published)
Dino Survival is a strategic, ecosystem-building card game about prehistoric life. Unlike many dinosaur-themed games that use dinosaurs as mascots or simple battling pieces, Dino Survival focuses on how real ancient animals lived, interacted, and survived. Every card represents a creature that once existed, and every turn reflects how species competed, coexisted, or shaped their environment. Players score points by building a stable ecosystem composed of dinosaur and prehistoric animal cards. Each card has a point value represented by gems. The total points needed to win adjusts based on the number of players. In multiplayer games, both herbivores and carnivores contribute to your score, but predators can attack other players creatures, shifting the balance of power. The game also includes a single-player mode with a different scoring dynamic: herbivores you play count toward your score, while all carnivores (even ones you play yourself) count against you. Solo play becomes an ecological puzzle, balancing stability, diversity, and survival while controlling the spread of predators. There are six major types of cards in Dino Survival, and each shapes your strategy in different ways. Sauropods allow unlimited hand size and protect against discard effects, forming the backbone of large, stable ecosystems. Defensive herbivores such as Stegosaurus can block predator attacks. Aggressive or armored herbivores, including Triceratops, Pachycephalosaurus, and Ankylosaurus, can eliminate carnivores outright if they are big enough, disrupting aggressive strategies. Smaller dinosaurs and early mammals allow players to cycle, trade, or filter cards, helping refine hand efficiency. Pterosaurs provide access to the discard pile, enabling clever retrievals and late-game reversals. Carnivorous theropods, such as Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus, hunt and remove opponents cards from play, allowing bold strategic strikes that can change the course of the game. And then there is the Asteroid. When played, it wipes out nearly everything on the table and forces players to go one more turn with what's left before the winner is crowned. The base game focuses on dinosaurs and a selected group of prehistoric animals from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. However, Dino Survival is designed as a journey through all of prehistoric life on Earth. Our first expansion, The Cambrian Explosion, is nearing completion and depicts the earliest complex ecosystems: trilobites, anomalocaridids, early fish, and reef organisms in ancient oceans. Future expansions will progress through time, allowing players to experience the Paleozoic seas, the Mesozoic reign of dinosaurs, and the Cenozoic ice ages of mammoths and saber-toothed cats. Players will be able to choose how to explore this timeline: playing each era as its own game, moving through Earth s history sequentially, or combining all expansions into one massive deck to explore what if encounters across time. Dino Survival invites players to do more than compete. It creates curiosity about the past, asking players to consider how life adapts, endures, and survives across millions of years. It is a game rooted in real natural history, built to inspire wonder, strategic thinking, and discovery. —description from the designer
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Game data sourced from BoardGameGeek, used under their API terms.
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