Little Dinosaurs
- Board's Eye View
- 13 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Professor Puzzle's Little Dinosaurs is a simple but appealing dinosaur-themed pattern-recognition speed game aimed at children age 4-6. It's played with a deck of 45 dinosaur cards and two custom six-sided dice - one for colour and one for pattern. The dinosaur cards come in three colours and three types: spotted, striped or plain. The cards are spread out on the table. One player rolls the dice and players then race to touch a card that has both characteristics. If they've touched a correctly identified card, they take it.
The game is easy enough at the start but it gets slightly more challenging with each round not so much because there are fewer cards on the table but because players cannot take dinosaurs that are the same species as any they've previously taken. Each species is also identified by a number on the dinosaur card, so if you cannot readily distinguish a Brachiosaurus from a Triceratops you just need to ensure that you only collect one card of each number. The winner is the first player to collect five different species of dinosaur.
The rules specify touching rather than grabbing cards, which is good news because with card games that invite grabbing you quickly end up with bent and mangled cards. The real-time speed element makes this an exciting game, and tho' it's aimed at younger children it's a game that all the family can play. It takes 2-4 players but, at a push, you could increase the player count.
Little Dinosaurs is attractively presented, with cutesified cartoon dinosaurs. And there's an educational element too because the game comes with an A4 'poster' showing the five dinosaur species featured in the game and identifying each of them by name. If you didn't previously know the difference between a Brachiosaurus and a Triceratops, you'll learn it as a spin-off of playing this game - tho', for the cogniscenti, be warned that the Triceratops is drawn in profile in Little Dinosaurs so we see only two of its three horns.
Unless you have one of those rare children who don't find dinosaurs appealing, Little Dinosaurs could be an ideal stocking-filler game.
