Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar

Game Info

Year

2022

Collection

Rating

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Description

Welcome to Isla Nublar, where you and other scientists, dreamers, and schemers will build an attraction like no other. Take on the role of visionaries John Hammond and Simon Masrani, visiting scientists Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Ellie Sattler and Dr. Ian Malcolm, sharp-minded park personnel Claire Dearing and Dr. Henry Wu, and many more, each playing a vital part in the island's legacy.

Together, you will transform Isla Nublar into an astonishing paradise where awe-struck visitors encounter creatures never before seen by human eyes. Decide where to build park facilities, dinosaur enclosures, and guest attractions — and keep employees and visitors safe from the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex, colossal Brachiosaurus, clever Velociraptor, and other threats.

In Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar, you play through twelve adventures in which you customize an entirely unique game board and breed new dinosaurs you cannot unmake. Your team's fateful choices will have a lasting impact, creating your own Isla Nublar story. Your experience will culminate in an endlessly replayable game of your own creation.

—description from the publisher

Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar Review (MINOR SPOILERS)

Board Stupid Mar 23, 2026

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Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar play

One Stop Co-op Shop Jun 12, 2026

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Overall sentiment (raw)

Positive

Pros

Engaging narrative presentation with comic-like elements.
Interesting blend of mechanics including legacy, cooperative, and action management.
Dinosaur encounters are tense and require strategic planning.
Item cards add variability and useful tactical options.
Legacy elements are present but not overwhelming in the tutorial.
The 'dream' narrative framing for the tutorial avoids spoilers and is a clever design choice.

Cons

The board is tall and hard to fit on a table, requiring it to be turned sideways.
Initial reviews were overly harsh, which the host found to be untrue after playing.
Some objectives can be challenging to achieve within the round limit.
Losing conditions (flipping consequence tokens) can be triggered easily.
The tutorial scenario might not fully represent the depth of the legacy campaign.

Thematic elements

Operating and managing a Jurassic Park
Isla Nublar
Story-driven through scenario book with comic-like presentation

Comparison games

none

Mechanics (from transcript analysis)

Action Point Allowance — Players have a set number of actions per round (nine total, distributed among characters, with one shared action), and actions like 'run', 'herd', 'search', 'heal', and 'trade' are detailed.
area control/influence — Placing buildings like the visitor center and genetics lab, and using barriers, influences dinosaur movement and player actions.
cooperative play — The host refers to it as a 'cooperative legacy game' and plays with two characters controlling them simultaneously.
Dice rolling — Dinosaurs attack by rolling dice with various symbols, and characters or items can be used to block or mitigate damage.
hand management — Players draw and use item cards that provide defensive capabilities or special actions.
legacy — The game is described as a 'cooperative legacy game' with elements like stickers to be added and a legacy side to character abilities that are not yet revealed.
Modular board — The game uses separate boards for buildings like the 'visitor center' and 'genetics lab' that are placed onto the main board.
Risk/Reward — The 'risky run' action involves moving through a carnivore's space and rolling a die to see if the character gets hurt, highlighting a risk for potential reward (progress).
scenario-based play — The game features scenarios, with the host playing through the 'introductory non-spoiler scenario' which has a specific story and objectives.
set collection — Objectives involve collecting specific items or tokens, such as revealing 'all four survey tokens' or achieving rows/columns of colored tiles.

Video topics + discussion points

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Quotes (from this video)

And no disclaimer for this one. I bought a copy for my nine well now 10-year-old for his birthday.
And yeah, just wanted to try it out since he's a big Jurassic Park fan.
And so far, this one seems pretty cool.
So, Isla Nublar is a cooperative legacy game, which is not my favorite usually. I don't like legacy games a lot.
And also for this one, I'm sure like a lot of you, I had heard initially the negative points that the Dice Tower brought up, so I didn't really have any interest in playing it.
But then a bunch of people on our Discord were saying that it was really great and that the reviews were overly harsh on the game.
So, I thought it was worth a try.
So, Isla Nublar is a cooperative legacy game, which is not my favorite usually.
And yeah, so far my initial plays of it have been fun.
But one person's review should not define a game.
So, I'm just going to play again through this tutorial scenario.
It is very basic.
It does not have anything legacy yet, so no spoilers whatsoever.
And then, if my son is into the game enough to play through the whole campaign, I might do a review of the whole thing when I'm finished.
So here we've got come aboard Hammond's dream.
Attention please prepare for arrival at Isla Nublar.
And the basic idea of this tutorial is that it is supposed to be John Hammond the creator of Jurassic Park dreaming about what he wants to do with the park.
And that's why nothing matters and no legacy things happen because it's all just a dream.
So here we go.
Let's uh go through this.
A million planning decisions fill John Hammond's mind as he dozes aboard the airplane.
He and his park planner, Alejandra Solano, are on route to Islaublar.
They'll meet up with the site crews who have been on the ground surveying for the best locations to build the park's first facilities.
And they're showing me what to unlock, what to use.
They add some stuff to the rulebook.
The questions of architects, landscapers, engineers, contractors, and scientists tug in all directions.
In his slumber, these stresses play out as strange dream visions of the choices Hammond must make.
And they end with the objectives that we have to actually do, although we also have to survive until the end of round five.
So, we need to reveal all four survey tokens.
I'll get into those in a second.
We need to place the visitor center and the genetics lab, which will come from the survey tokens and from the event round cards.
Uh, we need to make a row or column of purple crates in the visitor center to unload the shipments.
We need to get the dinosaur gene sequencing going by getting two columns in the genetics lab.
That's a gatsy.
Uh, yeah, maybe Gatka.
That'll make me think of it.
That's a good movie.
Gatka.
And we got to do all of that before round five and not lose.
And how losing works is from consequences.
By the way, the board is incredibly tall and very hard to fit on my table.
So, I've turned it sideways.
So, sorry that like some of the language here is going to be uh 90 degrees off.
But yeah, so many things in a game will cause you to take consequences, which means you flip one of these tokens over.
One of them is a zero, one of them is a two, the rest are ones.
And if I've flipped over enough to add up to five or more, then I lose.
And what's going to flip them over?
Well, first of all, you start off with some herbivores and carnivores in the game.
So, I've got the Brachiosaurus, Triceratops, T-Rex, and Velociraptors.
And if any of them take so much damage that it reaches or exceeds their vitality, I'm going to flip their board over or their little card, and it'll tell me how many consequence tokens I have to reveal.
Similarly, for my characters, they can take up to two injuries from dinosaur encounters, but if they take any more than that, I don't die, but each additional injury will cause a consequence to get flipped.
And then finally, many of these round cards in the five rounds we're going to play will have ongoing negative effects that will flip consequences unless we resolve some objective.
So, we're trying to minimize consequences by protecting the dinosaurs, even though they might be eating us by protecting ourselves and by resolving our objectives and these little side little missions that come up from the round cards.
And you have to control at least two characters.
So, I'm controlling Alejandra Solano, who's the only character you start with that I don't think was in the original movies.
At least I don't remember her.
But, she has one special ability, although you'll see there are certainly more to come that look like they'll get scratched off.
And then she even has this legacy side that they haven't told us how to use yet.
So all I know right now is this.
But yeah, so each character has one power at this point.
Hers is when taking a run action to enter a building, you may enter any room of that building.
So she can uh kind of move into the buildings better because there are these separate boards.
Once we get the visitor center and genetics lab that'll take us into other buildings.
And also, each character has a defense icon here because when the dinosaurs attack, they're going to roll these dice that have two misses, two velociraptor claws, one slash, and one pow.
And this is a free block she gets when attacked.
So, hers is only going to work one six of the time on a given die because there's only one POW there.
And the other character I picked who definitely was in the movie is Robert Mulun.
He was the uh the guy that said clever girl and sort of like the defense coordinator, whatever his job was.
Oh, game warden.
And he has hunter once per round before moving into a space with a carnivore, he may draw one item card.
So, he's going to get benefits from uh dealing with the velociraptor and the T-Rex.
And in the game, regardless of player count, you always have nine, that's not nine, nine actions to take per round.
So, in the case of two characters, they're each going to have four actions, but you can interlace them and like one person could take two actions and the next one could take one and vice versa.
But then the ninth action is a shared action.
And we pick each round who's going to use it.
Whereas with uh three players, you would each get three actions.
All right, but let's get into the game.
It's a pretty straightforward system, and I'll explain things as we go.
So, the first step of each round, again, sorry, it's turned, is to reveal the first round card.
Now, sometimes the scenario is going to define.
So, 1 2 3 and five are defined in this one, but sometimes it'll be random dinosaur danger cards like we have for round four.
Survey the island.
We'll decide the best places to build after meeting with the survey crews.
Okay.
When you search, also reveal and take any survey token in your zone.
Discard this when the field camp and mobile lab survey tokens have been revealed.
So, this giving us an ongoing action we can use for the entire scenario when we search, which is like a basic action you can always take.
Then, we also get to take a survey token in our space.
And if we can get two of the four, there's one on each dinosaur starting spot, then we can get rid of this.
Otherwise, we're going to have a consequence flip at the end of each round.
Okay, next we get to scout sectors.
So, we've got these six sectors here, 1 through six, each color-coded as well.
And they correspond, as you can see, to different areas of the board.
So, here's sector 1.
Uh, here's sector 2.
Here's sector 3.
And before the dinosaurs activate, we're going to flip all these over, and they're going to tell us how the dinosaurs activate and like whether they attack, where they move, that kind of stuff.
But this step, the scout sectors thing, allows you to automatically flip and see, not resolve, just see what it is, each of the sectors that has at least one character in it.
So, right now we're all in sector one at the helellipad to start out.
So, we get this card.
What's on here?
First of all, it tells us how many items you get if you take a search action in this sector.
You're drawing from this item deck.
They're all helpful.
It also has a weather forecast, which is not used in the tutorial, but I'm assuming it'll matter eventually.
And then it has herbivore and carnivore behavior.
So, if it's a direction, they're going to try to move in that direction.
And for carnivores, if it's a hunt icon, this little T-Rex mouth, they're going to try to attack someone in their space or adjacent, or they're going to just teleport basically and surprisingly show up like in the movies with an ambush.
But that's only for dinosaurs that are in sector one, of which there are none right now, so not that big a deal.
All right, now we got to take our actions.
So, let's go over our action option.
You can run, which moves you up to two spaces.
The risky run thing is just a clarification that you might get attacked if you move in with a carnivore.
You can lead if there's a follower.
There aren't any yet.
You can herd if you have two characters on one dinosaur space, which both cancels their first action for each turn.
So, it'll like usually stop carnivores from hunting, but also lets you move them where you want them.
You can search, which reveals your sector card, gets you item cards, and in this scenario gets the surveys.
You can heal yourself if you're indoors, and you can trade with other characters if you both have items.
And clearly, legacy game, there's more to come.
Well, the big thing for right now is clearly going to be to run to the survey tokens and then to flip them over with the search action.
So, moving is all orthogonal.
You cannot move through mountains, of which currently there are two here and here.
So, I think what makes sense is Muloon can go here, search, go here and deal with T-Rex, but he's a little bit better equipped to do that with his hunter ability and search again.
So, let's try that.
So, his first action, boop, you just flip these action tokens over to show you've taken one.
And then his second action, by the way, the herbivores don't mess with you at all unless the card says they do.
All right, so we're flipping the sector 5 card, which is going to get him an item.
That was nice.
We also see that the T-Rex is going to attack Maldoon if he stays on his base, which is not very comforting.
And then he'll try to move east, which would not work because that would be off the island.
We get to draw an item card.
So these are all starting items.
You unlock a lot more for the deck as you go, but only six items start out unlocked.
This one is a field knife.
So all items give you a defensive usage.
You can use them to prevent an attack of a specific type from a dinosaur.
So in this case, this one can prevent a claw attack, but it says you may defend against any one additional strike.
So it's kind of like a wild defense as well.
But if you do, the attacking dinosaur receives an injury, which remember is not necessarily great because if you kill the carnivores, then you're actually flipping over consequences.
But yeah, you can hold any number of items.
There are only six in the deck right now, so it's pretty quick to run out and not be able to draw any.
But that's it for Maldoon's second action.
Oh, no, it's not.
He needs to actually get the survey.
So he takes the token, and it is the field camp.
one of the two we need to find to get rid of the uh consequence generation of the round one card.
Heck yeah.
All right.
And again, we could have Alejandra do some other actions, but let's go ahead and go in here.
So, whenever you move through or into a carnivore's space, if there's nothing else there, so if there's not another dinosaur, if there's not another character, because then they'll distract them and you won't have to deal with their attack.
If none of that is true, then you are doing what's called a risky run and you need to roll a single die, even though T-Rex's usual attack is four dice to see if you get hurt.
But also remember Maldoon when he's about to move into a carnivore space, he gets another item.
I got a road flare.
We've seen that.
Uh, so discard when defending to stop a claw or discard to move a dinosaur from an adjacent space into your space.
I don't think I'd want to do that.
Our risky run is a POW, which oh sadly none of our items will protect us from except I guess the field knife.
But I think I want to keep the field knife for his big attack in a second if he hunts me.
So Maldun's got one of two injuries, which means he's closer to forcing us to flip over consequences, but also he cannot take the herd action to move and negate some of the activities of dinosaurs.
You have to be uninjured to do that.
But so it goes up for his fourth and final action.
Well, unless we give him the fifth bonus action, which actually I might to get him away from the T-Rex.
He's going to search again.
Now, we already know what the sector is, but it's one item.
Still applies for the whole round.
And we got binoculars.
Free action.
Once per round, reveal any one sector card without drawing items.
That's pretty dang nice.
And you know what?
Let's uh let's go and reveal sector six because I want to know what the velociraptors are doing.
So, they're going to hunt right now.
Nobody is anywhere near them.
So, they'll just teleport around the board.
I'll show you how that works.
whereas the Triceratops is going to move south and then east, bringing them right next to the T-Rex for better or worse.
But anyway, Maldoon is getting okay.
Immediately place a barrier token between any two zones and discard this.
So barriers go between locations and they will stop dinosaurs from trying to move past them and they'll also just like kind of thrash and destroy them instead of ambushing.
So I might actually put it near the velociaptors.
And in the case of this barrier, it has two X's, so it can get attacked twice before it's removed.
So, sure.
Let's lock down the velociraptors so they're not coming to hunt us right away.
That's all of Maldoon's basic actions.
Let's have Alejandra go one, two, three, four, and search over there.
Blue Sector 6 does have one item.
Oh, she got the hurting gear.
This one's really good.
Once per round, hurt a dinosaur without another character cuz usually you need to have two of you there.
That dinosaur receives an injury and it's a free action.
Or discard to defend two different things.
cuz that's probably the best item we've got.
But I don't want to shoot the triceratops.
He's not doing anything bad to me.
And oh, we got the mobile lab.
Nice.
Since we have received both of these, this card is discarded.
So, we won't get an automatic consequence this turn.
Although, we do still for our objective have to go get that survey at some point.
And just a note, uh the obstacles, the gates, the barriers, that's what they're called.
Couldn't remember.
Uh, they do not prevent characters from moving through, only dinosaurs.
So, we could get over there to the velociraptors if we want to.
All right, so that's all of Alejandra's actions, all of Maldoon.
We've got the extra ninth action.
And yeah, I think even though I mean the only negative of me running away from the T-Rex is that it's going to go attack the brachiosaur.
So, actually, yeah, you know what?
I should have done this anyway.
I'm sorry.
Let's go ahead and put a barrier right here instead of next to Velociraptor cuz there's a low chance the velociraptor will actually do anything negative.
And then Maldoon will go over to here to head towards the last survey token.
All right, so that's the take actions step.
Now we activate dinosaurs.
So we flip over every other sector so we can see the full activation.
Although here it doesn't really matter because there are only dinosaurs in sector 5 and six.
And we know about those.
And then we activate sectors in ascending order.
So 1 2 3 4 5.
So the dinosaurs in sector 5.
Let's get to them.
Brachiosauruses are going to go north.
So the herbivores move first.
Then the T-Rex is going to hunt.
So first they'll try to attack somebody in their space.
then they'll try to move in and attack somebody adjacent.
Uh, if they can't do any of that and nobody's like there for them to attack, they'll try to destroy a barrier near them.
And if none of that is true, then they'll ambush, reroll a d20, and put them on the matching area because each of them has a number 1 through 20.
But here, he wants to eat the brachioaur, but he can't reach him because of the barrier.
So he does the first of two damage to it.
Then he wants to move east, which he can't.
So he's done.
And then sector six, the triceratops is going to move south and then east.
And then the velociraptor is going to hunt, but nobody's within one of him.
So he is ambushing.
And wherever he lands, he will immediately attack if somebody's there.
Uh, yeah, it was low chances.
He's over here in 11.
That's nice.
But he will not move adjacent after an ambush.
So they need to literally like land right on a spot to get the free attack.
All right, then we end the round.
We get rid of all of this stuff.
We deal out six new faceown sector cards and we're good to go.
All right, so now you know the basic rules.
Uh, let's see our next round card.
Field Camp.
Following the surveys, we can replace the field camp with a real visitor center.
Hey, action.
If you're in an open zone, discard the field camp survey token to place a visitor center token in your zone and a road token connecting to an adjacent zone.
So, Maldun's got the field camp.
So, he'd be uh the one that needs to do that action.
And it says an open space, which in the tutorial is pretty basic.
It can't be the spot with the big lake.
Can't be the spot with the helellipad.
It can't be any of the four dinosaur homes.
But besides that, it can be anything.
So, it's like nothing that has a big illustration of something important in the middle of it.
So, one of us should probably get that last survey.
Oh, but first we're both in sector six.
So, let's reveal that again.
Storm warning doesn't matter at all.
There aren't currently any carnivores in there.
You get zero items for searching.
That's going to be great when we get that last survey.
So, yeah.
Nothing really good there.
All right, I'm going to move Maldoon first and go ahead and get the the thing going.
Uh, should I be near Alejandra?
Because we do need to do like the crates in there for that one objective.
So, even though I could like run closer to the helellipad, I don't know if I need to.
I think I'm actually going to put it right where I am.
So, for his first action, he's going to discard this field camp token and put the visitor center boop right in there.
Then, for his second action, he'll move in.
Let's show you how this works.
So, there are these boards for each of the locations.
You have to enter into the entrance.
Although if you have Alejandra's power, you can obviously not.
And then you have to move through doors, these little white spaces.
And the reason you want to do that is because each of these locations is going to give you a different way to manipulate whatever the special thing is for the visitor center in this case.
So while doing can move up to two spaces, but actually looking I want to be here for that power.
So I'm going to Well, hold on.
Hold on.
Actually, let's not move Maldoon yet, cuz Maldoon doesn't have to be the one to go in there.
I just realized he can go get the survey token.
Alejandra will be way better at this.
She's going to move in with a run action.
She has two moves.
The first one takes her to the tile with the visitor center.
And for the second one, she can move into any room with her power.
She's going in here where the little DNA strand gave the presentation in the first movie.
So, the objective said we have to have three purple tiles in a row or column.
This is like a complete three game, although no diagonals.
But right now we have no purples.
Now we can always see the top one on the pile, which is a purple, one of the ones we need.
So what we want to do is get more tiles in here.
How we do that is for one action we take and unload.
So Alejandra could do that for her second action.
And whichever room you're in is going to tell you from which side you push in the top tile of the pile.
Uh, pushing other things out.
And here I know what I'm going to do.
The theater lets me push from the bottom, which is what I want to do.
So I push all of these is for Alejandra's second action.
And several things happen.
And this is all detailed here.
The tile that's pushed off gets discarded.
You won't bring that back unless you run out of things.
Whenever you push the new tile gets revealed.
And then if after any push you have a row or column that is all the same color, you complete it.
So in this case, we've got three reds.
And the reds, by the way, started on the board, three of them in a diagonal like this, cuz they have little starting icons.
Uh, whereas all the rest of these were randomized.
Yeah.
So when you complete a row or column, you take them all off.
If you needed them, if they were part of objective, like the three purples we need, then we would uh just put them to the side and we would have completed the objective.
But otherwise, they are discarded, which means you get to fill in left to right, top to bottom.
Oh, empty.
Where are the purples?
There's another purple.
And then we get to see what the next one's going to be.
Another yellow.
Hm.
So, I guess it would make the most sense here would be to get to the entrance and then push to the right.
That would complete a column of yellows and get the purple in a spot where the uh other purple could be joined with it.
So, hey, back to Moldune.
We'll have him move in for his second action.
And he'll use his third action to push the yellow as planned.
Like that.
The green goes away and then all three of the yellows go away.
And we should get another purple here cuz we're running out.
Yep, there it is.
And actually, I think this Yeah, cuz there's four of each color.
There we go.
And since there's nothing left, we do shuffle the pool.
I believe.
Not that we really care.
All right
Isla Nublar is a cooperative legacy game, which is not my favorite usually.
So far my initial plays of it have been fun.
One person's review should not define a game.
The basic idea of this tutorial is that it is supposed to be John Hammond the creator of Jurassic Park dreaming about what he wants to do with the park. And that's why nothing matters and no legacy things happen because it's all just a dream.
The board is incredibly tall and very hard to fit on my table.
If I've flipped over enough to add up to five or more, then I lose.
All I know right now is this. But yeah, so each character has one power at this point.
If any of them take so much damage that it reaches or exceeds their vitality, I'm going to flip their board over or their little card, and it'll tell me how many consequence tokens I have to reveal.
He was the uh the guy that said clever girl and sort of like the defense coordinator, whatever his job was. Oh, game warden.
This one is a field knife. So all items give you a defensive usage. You can use them to prevent an attack of a specific type from a dinosaur.
The chopper blocker only says the brachiosaurus has to not be on the helipad.
So, we have survived, although a lot closer to death than I would expect for a tutorial.

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