Tiny Epic Dinosaurs – The Unboxinating!
Welcome to the freshly unboxed game and my take on the parts and such. Today, I opened Tiny Epic Dinosaurs (from Gamelyn Games) and my very first impression is OMG DINO SQUEE!
Number One: These dinos! I can see where this isn’t going to be a good game for people who might have dexterity issues because these dinos are TINY! (and epic) and might be hard to move around. But you can’t deny they have a certain Je ne squee quoi.
I’m not gonna lie, I spent about 20 minutes just digging through the bag of dinos (and other not as important but probably useful Meeple bits) to see what was what. I also might have been looking for my favorite dino (Plesiosaurus, thanks for asking) because come on, who didn’t go through a dino phase when they were young? And given a bag of random dinos, aren’t you gonna go looking for your favorite? What I did find is that there are 4 main dinos in Blue, Yellow, Green and Red – corresponding to Diplodocus (or possibly Sauroposeidon), Stegosaurus, Velociraptor and a bitey stompysaur that I’m gonna say is an Allosaurus because there is a purple beastie that is definitely a T-Rex.You know what? Why don’t I just look at the directions and settle this now? Allosaurus. And the sauropod is a Brachiosaurus. Then there are a bunch of one-off purple dinos where I found my favorite swimmy saur. Triceratops, Anklesaur, T-Rex and one of the flying fellows are also represented as are a handful of others (15 total).
In case you are wondering, there are also people meeples, barrier meeples, food meeples and a great round marker. But really we all came here for the tiny (epic!) dinos.
Number 2: After spending about 20 minutes with the dinos, I decided maybe to look at the rest of the game because you are probably tired of me going on about itty-bitty-saurs. First off, Gamelyn Games does some really good work on their TinyEpic series. Games Library has 4 of these now and every one has been solid and had great parts.
Tiny Epic Dinosaurs does not slack; check out the artwork. The outside is Colorful and kawaii and I am very excited to be playing what looks like a dinosaur ranching game (but TINY!). The inside cover and inside box bottom also have artwork and they didn’t have to do that.
Number 3: The rest of the components. There are cards and player mats and this really makes me realize that this is what I wanted Dinosaur Island from Pandasuarus games to be.
Number 4: Parts list! I love parts lists that are well organized and have pictures so you don’t spend 5 hours trying to figure out what Curse cards are versus Spell cards versus Hex cards. Tiny Epic Dinos not only layout the components really nicely BUT! There are also parts on the bottom of the box (which I dislike if that is the only place you can find them but as a redundancy? Woot that!).
Number 5: Is there anything I didn’t like about this game? Not yet, but I have a question: Why Velociraptor and Allosaurus for the A list dinos and not Velociraptor and Triceratops? Why 2 stompy-bitey-saurs? They did a really good job of differentiating between all 3 really similarly built dinosaurs (that are about a quarter to a half an inch tall) but when did Allosaurus become an A lister?
Lastly :
