The Great Dinosaur Rush — or the Bone Wars, as it's otherwise called — was a period of incredible advancement in paleontology (i.e., the discovery of fossils).
In The Great Dinosaur Rush, players compete to grab bones from the best dig sites, and build new dinosaurs for prestigious museums, gaining notoriety in the process by stealing bones, sabotaging dig sites, and otherwise impeding your fellow paleontologists.
The game is played over turns, each with two main phases: dig and build. During the dig phase, players collect different-colored bones from dig sites and perform actions. Some dirty actions give players secret notoriety tokens. Notoriety adds to players' scores at the end of the game, but having the MOST notoriety SUBTRACTS from the score! During the build phase, players create their dinosaurs from the bones they collected, maximizing them to score points in various museum categories: length, size, height, ferociousness, etc.
You'll have to play dirty if you want to win — just not too dirty!
- Inclusive, easy-to-run creativity with constrained components
- Accessible entry point for new players while still offering depth
- Specifics of scoring and deeper strategic depth are unclear from the clip
- creativity under constraint, dinosaur construction
- Dinosaur-themed construction with constraints
- fun, approachable puzzle-like
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Block-based dinosaur construction under constraints — Players build dinosaurs with small pieces; creativity is guided by piece limitations.
- Low-barrier, accessible construction — Anyone can assemble a dinosaur from the provided blocks, emphasizing ease of play.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- the mechanic is you lay out tiles and players use these chisels which are pretty cute
- this great dynamic that emerges is you're trying to do things and cut off large regions
- the tension around oh no like i might not have the majority more and then i'm not going to get as much
- the second mechanic is all these pieces are in separate bags… the piece that you're choosing has a huge impact both to you and to other players
- the aesthetic of expression having fun through creativity
- you flip it over and then they are like basically one unit you like clear down to just one unit
References (from this video)
- Unique tactile idea
- Strong thematic hook
- Unknown long-term gameplay depth
- Team discovery and tactile interaction
- Dinosaur exploration and bone assembling
- Playful and tactile
- Takenoko
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Team-based drafting / resource gathering — Players cooperate to uncover dinosaur bones and assemble skeletons.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- it's so silly isn't it it's so light it's so humorous
- let me show you how it works in flick up
- we're taking different themes we're mashing them together to create these games
- pandemic the cure is the best
- takenoko chibies is really good
- it's going to look fantastic
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer themed version of legendary would be all over it
- Dominion was the pure deck builder