At Spellenspektakel Utrecht 2025, I came across the Quality Beast stand, where they were exhibiting their games, including Gods Love Dinosaurs.
Intro
Create your own ecosystem where everything revolves around who gets eaten and when. Is there enough food? Then the animals can reproduce without worry. Is there too little food in your ecosystem? Then the animals are doomed to starve.
Beoordeling
| Overall | 9 |
| Story | 8 |
| Game system | 9 |
| Design & art | 9 |
| Replayability | 10 |
Gods Love Dinosaurs is a fun tactical family game for 2 to 5 players aged 10 and up. It has an average playing time of 45 to 60 minutes. The right balance is vital and resources are scarce, so choose wisely!
Story
We return to the time when dinosaurs roamed our planet in search of food to survive. The food chain is a fact and a constant throughout the evolution of our planet.
Build an ecosystem where prey animals dwell on plants and predators eat these prey animals in order to reproduce. Can you maintain the balance so that the dinosaurs can continue to dominate your ecosystem? Take a good look at the balance and the scarce resources available to achieve your goal as best you can.
Objective: Earn as many points as possible by providing your dinosaurs with food so that they can reproduce. The player with the most dinosaurs and eggs wins the game.
Rules of the game
A turn consists of the following steps:
- Take and place a tile
- Activate animals
- Activate dinosaurs (if applicable)
• Step 1: Take and place a tile: As the starting player, take the volcano token; this indicates that it is your turn.
Choose one ecosystem tile from the animal board. You may choose from any available tile. Place the tile on your own ecosystem. It may be placed anywhere, as long as it touches your current ecosystem on one side. The type of terrain does not matter for placement.
If an animal is depicted on the tile, take the corresponding animal from the supply and place it on the image.
• Step 2: Activating animals: When you have taken the last tile from an animal column, the animal depicted under the column is activated. The depicted animal is activated simultaneously by all players in their own ecosystems. There are several possible activations:
- Activating prey animals
- Activating predator animals
When activating, carry out the following steps:
- Activating prey animals: When a prey animal is activated, it expands when possible. You may expand each animal of this species in your ecosystem to one empty preferred habitat adjacent to the field on which the animal stands.
- Take an active prey animal from the stock and place it on the empty preferred habitat tile adjacent to the animal. Joker tiles also count here. If there are several empty preferred habitats adjacent to each other, choose one of them.
- If there are no empty adjacent preferred habitat tiles, your animal cannot expand.
- You may also choose not to let your animal expand.
- Activating a predator: Predators need food when they are activated. If they find nothing on their way during activation, they will starve. When a predator is activated, every predator of that species in your ecosystem must move and eat every prey they encounter. How the predators move depends on which predator is activated.
- Tiger: Tigers may move up to two spaces across the ecosystem in any direction. They must end their movement on a tile containing prey. When the tiger eats prey on its way, it disappears from the playing field and you put it back in the supply.
- If your tiger encounters two prey animals, it eats the first prey animal which is then replaced by a new tiger. You then stop on the second space with a prey animal and eat it as a meal.
- Eagle: Eagles may move up to three spaces across your ecosystem, but they must move in a straight line. Here too, there must be a prey animal on the last space. If the eagle eats one or two other prey animals, these spaces become the space of an offspring that you may take from the supply.
- Tiger: Tigers may move up to two spaces across the ecosystem in any direction. They must end their movement on a tile containing prey. When the tiger eats prey on its way, it disappears from the playing field and you put it back in the supply.
Please note: If a predator cannot find food, it starves and is removed from the board and returned to the supply.
• Step 3:Activating a dinosaur When the last ecosystem tile from a column is chosen and the column is completely empty, while the dinosaur is at the bottom of the column, not only the prey or predator is activated, but also all dinosaurs. This happens after the animal in the column has been activated. Follow these steps:
- Hatch dinosaur eggs
- Move dinosaurs
- Move the dinosaur marker
- Refill the animal columns.
• Hatch dinosaur eggs
You may hatch one of your eggs from your nest. To do this, remove one egg from your nest and take a dinosaur from the supply. Place it on the mountain field in the centre of your starting tile with the image of a nest.
This is only possible if there is no dinosaur on this space. If there is still one there, you cannot hatch a dinosaur egg this turn.
• Moving dinosaurs
Each of your dinosaurs must move through your ecosystem, including the newly hatched dinosaur. Dinosaurs may move up to five spaces in any direction and may change direction while moving. They eat every animal they encounter, except other dinosaurs. A dinosaur must end on an empty mountain space and may not move across a space occupied by another dinosaur.
For each predator that eats a dinosaur in its path, you receive one egg, which you place next to your ecosystem on your nest tile. Each eaten prey and predator immediately returns to the supply.
Prey animals do not yield eggs, but they do prevent the dinosaur from starving.
• Moving the dinosaur marker
When all the dinosaurs have been hunting, move the dinosaur marker on the animal board to the next animal column. When the marker reaches the last column, it goes back to the first one.
• Replenishing the animal columns
Finally, replenish each completely empty animal column with ecosystem tiles. Do this from left to right. When the stack of A tiles is finished, start with the B stack and so on in alphabetical order.
End of the game
When there are no more ecosystem tiles left to fill the empty columns after a dinosaur activation, the game ends immediately.
The players count their points: 1 point for each egg and for each dinosaur in their ecosystem. The player with the most points wins the game.
Content and design
The game pieces are of very good quality and the design is beautifully finished.
The game system is very well designed and thought out. This edition offers wonderful quality materials: both the graphics and the wooden game pieces are of very good quality.
The rule book is very clear and provides extensive and clear examples, making the rules very child-friendly. For me, this is definitely an added value.
Because the theme is recognisable to everyone, it is easy to introduce to people who are less familiar with the world of games.
Also in the box
• 1x rulebook
• 1x animal board
• 5x starting tiles
• 5x nest tiles
• 84x ecosystem tiles
• 1x volcano token
• 145x wooden animals (6 types: dinosaurs, rats, frogs, rabbits, tigers, eagles)
• 45x wooden eggs
Conclusion
Gods Love Dinosaurs is a game designed by renowned game designer Kasper Lapp (Magic Maze) and published by Panda Saurus Games in 2020. Quality Beast was responsible for the first Dutch edition in 2021.
Gods Love Dinosaurs is a strategic tile game and a perfect family game. The theme also appeals to children. Because resources are scarce and you always have to find the right balance, it is a game that requires quite a bit of tactics and that is well designed.
The quality of the wooden pieces is excellent and really invites you to get started with the figures.
This game is simply a really fun game to play with children and friends. The recommended age is 10 years and up, but if you have a child at home who is already familiar with games such as Cascadia, then this game is also easy to explain when playing together for the first time. It is more complex than Cascadia, but with sufficient guidance the first time, your child will quickly get the hang of it.
Quality Beast has produced a very high-quality edition with this version. Quality Beast has also started developing its own games, in which they attach importance to the ecological aspect and, for example, to female-friendliness in their games.
I have no complaints about the game and can only express my praise.
Other games published by Quality Beast can be found in the reviews on this website.
More info: https://qualitybeastug.myshopify.com/products/dinoparadijs
Text and photography: Esmeralda Wolf
