What do you get when you take the buggest trend to hit gaming in a decade and cross it with one of the top selling themes in kiddie history? Steve Jackson hopes you get a license to print money. The rest of us get Dino Hunt, a collectible trading card game where the targets of your safari are nothing less than the biggest beasts to ever live.
Before your eyes roll back into your head, let me clarify things a bit. Dino Hunt is not your father's collectible trading card game. If anything, it's your kid's. Both players draw from the same deck of cards, so buying booster packs won't increase your chance of winning. All it will do is provide a greater variety of cards in the overall mix— and give you a shot at collecting all the dinos, if you're into that sort of thing. And many kids are.
Each player in takes the role of a hunter traveling through time to "bag" as many dinosaurs as possible. Lest animal activists cry foul, rest assured that no dinosaurs are harmed in the play of the game— they're merely knocked out with stun guns and transported to the present for everyone to see and study. Michael Crichton, eat your heart out.
The cards themselves are about the size of a tarot deck, perhaps a little longer, and come in two varieties. Specials are events, gadgets, and experts which help the hunter catch his prey or hinder opponents from doing the same. There are relatively few of them, and the starter box doesn't come with a complete set. Getting additional specials is one of the enticements offered by booster packs. Since everyone plays from the same deck, they don't offer an advantage to the owner but do spice up the mix with greater variety. The rest of the cards, which is to say most of them, are dinosaurs of every shape and size. Each dinosaur is attractively illustrated by one of three artists. The forms of the beasts are supposedly scientifically correct, but the artists took quite a few liberties with the color scheme in the name of appearance. The back of each dinosaur card shows educational information about that dinosaur, which the kiddies can undoubtedly recite from memory ad nauseum.
The game takes place along a timeline consisting of five eras from the triassic to the late cretaceous. Each player starts in the late jurassic period, the center of the timeline. A number of dinosaurs are dealt from the top of the deck. Each card indicates the era in which the dino gets placed, everyone charges their power cells to the max of 10, and the hunt begins.
A random number of dinosaurs get dealt into the world at the start of each player's turn. You can only hunt dinosaurs living in your current era, and it costs energy to travel along the timeline. To hunt, you just roll the die and check the result against the guide printed on that dinosaur's card. High rolls succeed and low rolls fail— the actual spread varies with each dinosaur (although we're only dealing with values from 1 to 6, so the range doesn't vary much). Most misses are benign— you lose a bit of energy, but can continue your turn and even take another shot at the same dinosaur if it didn't run away. A miss against the more dangerous dinos can result in ending your turn or losing a special card, but these are by far the exception and not the rule.
On a successful shot the hunter can send his prize forward in time and into his scoring pile. Beasts cost varying amounts of energy to transport. Their scoring value also varies, generally commensurate with the difficulty and danger involved in capturing and transporting it. Unless a hunter's turn is ended by a bad roll, it continues until the hunter runs out of energy or decides to stop. Since your energy gets recharged at the start of each turn, hunters generally keep going until they run out of juice.
So the hunting in Dino Hunt is really nothing more than a simple die roll, with very little ability to improve your chances of success (unless you have the right specials). But oddly, it works. The atmosphere's good, it keeps moving at a brisk clip, and it's a perfectly fine way to pass time.
Special cards add welcome spice to the proceedings. Each player draws one at the start of his turn and can earn more through good hunting. If a player bags the last critter from an era, he draws a special as a reward. This incentive leads to some strategizing when deciding where to hunt and where to place dinosaurs which live in multiple eras.
When the last dino disappears, players tally their scores (which can include bonuses for some types of dinosaurs if the player holds the right special cards) and the highest score wins.
Given the standalone nature of this collectible card game, it's disappointing that Steve Jackson Games went with a common/uncommon/rare scheme instead of a flat card distribution. Completists and dinomaniacs will have a hard time collecting them all, but the back of the timeline doubles as a checklist so at least you can keep track. All boxed sets are identical, by the way, and five-card boosters retail for 99 cents. The limited edition cards in the boosters have a gold border around them, so you can tell them apart from the unlimited cards in the starter set.
We also noticed that the vast majority of dinosaurs are native to the Late Cretaceous period, at the far right of the timeline. This reduces the amount of traveling in the game. With the odds so weighted towards dinosaurs appearing in that period, moving away is a gamble which usually costs you energy. This imbalance might be historically accurate (I'm not a dinophile, so I don't know), but I suspect the game would be improved if the distribution was a bit more even. Of course, players are free to remove dinos from the deck to create whatever mix they prefer.
By now you've seen that Dino Hunt is not targeted at the serious gamer, unless you view it as a beer 'n' pretzels romp. It scores a direct hit for the family audience, though, with simple play mechanics and a quick pace. The size of the dinosaur deck determines the game's length, making it easy to adjust as desired.
Dino Hunt is really a standalone old-fashioned family game masquerading as a collectible trading card game, and I encourage you not to be dissuaded by the collectible angle. You can easily ignore the boosters and enjoy the starter box as a complete game. If someone in your family has seen Jurassic Park or The Lost World twenty times or has Dinotopia posters hanging in their room, this is a pretty safe bet. Just don't expect a strategic exercise or deep gameplay.