Warlizard Gaming Forum

In Dinosaur Island, players will have to collect DNA, research the DNA sequences of extinct dinosaur species, and then combine the ancient DNA in the correct sequence to bring these prehistoric creatures back to life. Dino cooking! All players will compete to build the most thrilling park each season, and then work to attract (and keep alive!) the most visitors each season that the park opens.

Do you go big and create a pack of Velociraptors? They'll definitely excite potential visitors, but you'd better make a large enough enclosure for them. And maybe hire some (read: a lot of) security. Or they WILL break out and start eating your visitors, and we all know how that ends. You could play it safe and grow a bunch of herbivores, but then you aren't going to have the most exciting park in the world (sad face). So maybe buy a roller coaster or two to attract visitors to your park the good old-fashioned way?

Bios:Megafauna starts where the predecessor game Bios:Genesis left off, with the invasion of the land on the daybreak of the Phanerozoic eon. Starting as either a plant, mollusk, insect, or vertebral skeletal type, your flapping, paddling, and squawking carnivores and herbivores make a beachhead on one of the drifting continental plates in the Cambrian, Their struggle for terrestrial dominance may eventually include language-based consciousness. Although this achievement elevated a certain mammal species to notoriety, in your game things may occur differently.

This second edition of Bios:Megafauna is an evolutionary descendant of American Megafauna but as a part of the Bios series of games it is linked to the game Bios:Genesis. It plays well independently but if you have both games you can let the end state of a game of Bios:Genesis affect the starting state of a game of Bios:Megafauna. A successor game, called Bios:Origins (which would be a descendant of Origin), is planned to cover the events of the Quaternary period including the rise of ideas and technology.

Put on a lizard and go for an adventure!

Choose your lizard carefully. You can find six different ones scattered across the land, each with its own special ability.

You'll need these abilities as you make your difficult journey through many dangerous places. Carefully hop your way to the top of an active volcano. Surf down a surging river. Swim an underwater lake. Ascend a snowy mountaintop. What kind of strange creatures will you meet? Can you unravel the mysteries of Lizard?

I bet half of all the current redditors don't even get the reference anymore!

From the BGG description:

Dominant Species is a game that abstractly recreates a tiny portion of ancient history: the ponderous encroachment of an ice age and what that entails for the living creatures trying to adapt to the slowly-changing earth. Each player will assume the role of one of six major animal classes—mammal, reptile, bird, amphibian, arachnid, or insect. Each begins the game more or less in a state of natural balance in relation to one another. But that won’t last: It is indeed "survival of the fittest".

Through wily action pawn placement, players will strive to become dominant on as many different terrain tiles as possible in order to claim powerful card effects. Players will also want to propagate their individual species in order to earn victory points for their particular animal. Players will be aided in these endeavors via speciation, migration, and adaptation actions, among others.

All of this eventually leads to the end game—the final ascent of the ice age—where the player having accumulated the most victory points will have his animal crowned the Dominant Species.

But somebody better become dominant quickly, because it’s getting mighty cold...

-----

This is a comparatively simple wargame-like game which runs for about 4 hours. It is one of my favourite games because it is so simple that I can teach it in 12-20 minutes without consulting the rules - yet it's heavy enough to keep you engaged.

You can also play as Lizards :D