Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I didn’t know there was a market for players looking for a dinosaurus skirmish game rich with history…but then the team at Ion Game Design handed me a copy of Dino Dynasty, their 2025 release designed by Ion’s Chief Creative Officer, Jon Manker. About a year prior, Manker had led a small group of media members through a demo of the game, and the most striking part about that walkthrough was the stunning dino art from artist Johan Egerkrans.
The work of Egerkrans, the author/illustrator of the book Dinosaur Dynasties, is the real star and reason to give the game Dino Dynasty a look. The game is an impressively streamlined version of more complex skirmish games, especially compared to some of the more rules-dense wargames I cover here on the site.
But the real question for me is the audience—while we had fun with our plays here, I can’t for the life of me figure out who the target audience is for the product.
This Biome Isn’t Big Enough for the Both of Us
Dino Dynasty is a very snappy “troops on a map” game for 1-6 players. The game’s incredible level of customization starts with the setup: there are more than 20 different playable dinosaur clans, 30 double-sided map set-up cards, 12 public milestone cards (with six used in a given game), and special event tiles that might be used in the initial map. When considering these options mixed with the wide player count range, Dino Dynasty is automatically the winner of the phrase “you’ll never play the same game twice” thanks to these upfront options.
Like other good skirmish games, the maps in Dino Dynasty are usually not very big…and the end condition comes when the map—beginning with just a few tiles scattered across a grid scaled up to the selected setup card—is completely full of tiles. The side of the box says this is a game that could run 30-60 minutes, and save for my first game (a three-player game), none of my games lasted even an hour. So, Dino Dynasty gets in and out quickly.
The goal here is tied to each game’s chosen Challenge cards, the public milestone cards mentioned earlier. Whoever best meets each Challenge card earns that card during end-game scoring, and the player with the most cards wins. That usually means winning three cards outright determines the winner, but in a fun twist, five of the six cards are regular scoring cards. One Challenge card is used as the tiebreaker for every other Challenge card, so making sure players stay competitive with the goals of the tiebreaker card becomes critical in such a low-scoring affair.
Gameplay is even more straightforward. On a turn, players must grow their dino tribe, move it around the map, go to war by competing against other tribes, or evolving their species by using a series of attribute trackers to make their dinos more focused in one action area by weakening another. Everything is in support of the Challenge cards, so it is very, very easy to stay focused on what matters, while also giving players a chance to drive the end game as hard as they would like: building out the map is the game’s only timer.
When a dino tribe is wiped off the map—and that happened a couple times in my plays—the player who goes extinct respawns with the same or a different species on their very next turn, so they are never really out of the fight. I love this, and it encourages players to try even harder to battle other dinos for domination. (Combat is a breeze, and has a nice mix of deterministic qualities tied to a simple die roll…with the loser usually losing only a small number of troops each time around.)
But Wait…There’s Roar
I’m still a bit shocked at how much stuff there is in the Dino Dynasty package.
There are 28 different dinosaur species across six “dynasties”, flavors represented by different colors. Each dino has perks, 1-2 powers that appear on their player boards, and there are “Morph Tokens” scattered around the map for players to add more dino powers to their portfolio. The 80+ map tiles include a number of tiles that represent global events; each tile is double sided, and the way they are added gives each game a unique flavor to how dinos move around the map, with an Escape Plan-style movement system tied to the terrain type of each newly-added biome.
In one of my plays, I was able to add a Meteor Crater event, which I used to wipe out all the dinos in the eight tiles surrounding the one I placed during a Migrate action. Sure, I lost four of my very weak Protarchaeopteryx dinos in the blast, but I was able to wipe five of my Saltasaurus foes across two tiles off the face of the earth as a result. (Suck it, baddies!)
So, there are fun special events. Cool powers. A five-game campaign mode if you want to duke it out in a series. An easy-to-administer solo mode, with a simple deck of “Stasis” action cards used to dictate the AI here. Although I do not have a copy, there’s also an expansion, Dino Dynasty: From Armor to Tail Clubs…but the base game is so rich, I’m struggling to imagine any scenario where a player works their way through everything in the base game after even their 20th or 30th play.
This is all to say that Dino Dynasty is an exceptional production, even beyond the stellar artwork by Egerkrans.
Deciphering the Winning Formula
The two guys who joined me for plays from my review crew also enjoyed what’s here, despite a set of rules that is a little clunky for new players (we watched two different how-to videos to get the rhythm down). I stuck to the A and B-sized maps for my plays, in part because games were shorter using those setups. If a player wants to use the largest maps possible with the highest player count, that option is there as well, although I can’t say for sure if games will stick to that hour timeframe I landed on during my plays.
After that first play, one of the guys asked a question that I have been thinking about since that game:
“I like what’s here. I’m just not sure who I would break this out with.”
I try to be sneaky with my review plays; I always do a play with my review crew, then I try to play a game with a second, separate group to gather thoughts from different perspectives. (Third plays are usually a mix of solo, the wife, or socializing a title with my Wednesday casual group.) To do that, I sometimes leave games I want to table out during game night, in the hopes that a player will see a box and be intrigued enough for me to trick them into doing a play.
I tried that with Dino Dynasty for about a month after that first play, then again after I squeezed in a solo play. I was intrigued about the idea of a six-player dino fight—a dino crisis, you might say—but I never found the audience across my circles to break out Dino Dynasty with another circle. I didn’t help my cause when a player asked about the box: “what’s Dino Dynasty all about?”
“It’s a quick-playing dino fight,” I went with. “Pretty quick teach, maybe 10 minutes, plays in about an hour.”
That night, Dino Dynasty lost out to Grand Austria Hotel; I didn’t have the horses to sell Dino Dynasty to that crowd, apparently.
I share that story because I think “tablebility”—my made-up phrase for a game’s ability to regularly hit the table—is my only real hesitation with Dino Dynasty. The gameplay is fun but I think game owners might have a harder time getting Dino Dynasty pushed to the front of the line.
If you have the right group for a beautiful, quick, dino-themed wargame, not only do I recommend Dino Dynasty, I am incredibly impressed by the range of your playgroup. That’s the territory where the campaign format might be the right move for your group and that might give Dino Dynasty its best opportunity to shine.
