Dinosaur Island Rawr 'n Write

Dinosaur Island Rawr ‘n Write is a dice drafting/resource management game for 1-4 people from Pandasaurus Games and not, as its name implies, a “roll and write” game*. In it, you are putting together a dinosaur amusement park, trying to balance excitement and danger while earning victory points.

Setup starts with randomizing which buildings and specialists are available in the game. There are 20 different buildings and 20 different specialists in the box, but you only use three of each in any given game. Each person also gets their own sheets to create their park. A game lasts three seasons and each season consists of three phases, two action phases and one phase to run your park. During the action phases, you start by grabbing dice from the dice bag and rolling them. You roll two dice per player, plus one extra (eg 7 dice in a three player game). Starting with the start player and going around clockwise, you will select one die to put near your park. Once the last player has selected a die, they will select a second die and then, going around counterclockwise this time, each other player will select a second die as well. Once everybody has selected two dice, they obtain the resources from their dice and then each player receives both the resources and threat from the leftover die. Then, starting with the start player and going around clockwise, each player uses their dice one at a time to take actions from the game board like making dinos or building roads/attractions, gaining threat if you have to place a die on top of another. Once everybody has placed both their dice, you put all the dice back in the bag. After two action phases in a season, you move on to running your park. Running your park takes places over 5 steps. First, you gain resources from your attractions. Second, you can use abilities from the specialists you’ve hired. Third, you run a dino tour where, starting from your HQ, you travel the park along roads and buildings, ending at a building or park exit that hasn’t already been used for a dino tour. Each building you travel through that hadn’t already been used on a dino tour earns you one excitement and exits will be worth the value they have listed on your sheet. Fourth, you gain resources from your excitement track. Each time you gain excitement over the course of the game, you circle the next space on your excitement track. During this step, any spaces on the track with resources that have been circled generate those resources for you. Fifth, you count up the death toll. For each threat that is unsecured on your security track, you mark off one box on your death track. When you mark off a disaster box on the death track, you choose one of the 5 disasters to happen to your park, like losing buildings or DNA you’ve stored. After three seasons, you add up victory points to determine the winner. Points are earned for each dinosaur, specialist and building in your park, for each park exit reached by a tour, for the amount of excitement generated and for unused leftover DNA and points are lost for each death in the park.

The obvious comparison is to Dinosaur Island, the game it’s loosely based on, but as I haven’t played Dinosaur Island, all I can say is that it seems like a simplified version of Dinosaur Island in some ways. I also can compare it to Welcome to Dino World, a “roll and write” dinosaur amusement park game I reviewed a while back. Both have you building a dinosaur amusement park, worrying about making your park both the most entertaining as well as being worried about the dinosaurs getting out. I’d say that Welcome to Dino World ends up being a simpler game, as while you do have to worry about powering the dinosaur pens, there are far fewer things to manage in comparison to Rawr ‘n Write.

I do like Rawr’ n Write quite a bit. It does have a relatively high initial amount of learning, as your first in-game action requires knowing what all the different symbols are and how you gain them. You also have to know the construction rules, which are crucial for park tours, but might have to be implemented immediately during your first action phase just as part of gaining resources from drafting your dice. I personally dislike roads in the game, as they are mandatry for park tours earning points, but do nothing by themselves and feel like afterthoughts. Like a lot of games with a higher up-front amount of knowledge, playing through one round as a practice round before playing for real might be a good choice. Once you have played a bit, it makes it easier to understand what you are doing in any given game and makes the later rounds much smoother, even as you have more things you are doing.

Ultimately, I’d say that Rawr ‘n Write is a fun dice drafting game that, while I dislike how roads are implemented, is a fun game with a decent amount of replayability from the buildings and specialist cards and the dice rolled.

Dinosaur Island Rawr 'n Write is available now from our webstore.

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*Okay, so what did I mean when I said in the first sentence that Dinosaur Island Rawr ‘n Write is not a “roll and write” game? Well, a “roll and write” game works by rolling dice/drawing cards/randomly generating an outcome and then using the outcome to write/draw on your sheet. While this game does technically have rolling dice and writing results, it doesn’t really function in the same way. As I said, it uses dice drafting and resource management as its main mechanics. The dice drafting is basically the same as games like Sagrada. With the dice being drafted, it feels steps removed from most “roll and writes.” In most, the dice rolled are just what is fully available. The Clever series feels one step removed where one person rolls dice and selects some, but everybody else gets access to the remaining dice. In them, everybody also gets to be the person rolling and selecting once per round. Rawr ‘n Write feels one more step beyond, where there’s only one die that the group has access to and everybody just drafts most of their choices. Beyond that, while each “roll and write” will do its own thing, Rawr ‘n Write feels more like Terraforming Mars or Wingspan, where you obtain resources in order to build things to earn victory points. Corinth is one of the closest as it has resources you obtain first and spend later, but has only two resoures and 4 buildings to spend them on that are listed on your sheet and are just available every turn.

Ultimately, while there are technically aspects of “roll and write” in Rawr ‘n Write, it feels less like a “roll and write” than other games. For example, Patchwork (not Patchwork Doodle, but Patchwork) feels more like a “roll and write” than Rawr ‘n Write. There’s not a random outcome each turn, just randomizing the tiles at the beginning, but you are using those to fill out your grid, albeit with placing tiles instead of drawing the shape. Similarly, Tiny Epic Galaxies feels closer to Rawr ‘n Write than Rawr ‘n Write feels to a “roll and write.” Both have you rolling dice to gain resources, using your board to “store” resources instead of gaining physical components, spending the resources to build up your domain. The marking of your sheet feels like a way to save on components more than it does an essential part of the gameplay. In the end, this is just my analysis and if you feel it still is a “roll and write,” that is fine, but it doesn’t feel like one to me.