Time travel is big these days! Wealthy tourists love traveling back to the cretaceous jungle to see their favorite dinosaurs on safari, and stay at well-themed dino resorts. Now it’s your turn to go back and take control of one of these rail & resort companies and give your customers the best experience you can! Only then will you be named the best company owner of the past!

What Is It?

🥅The Goal of the game is to have the most successful rail & resort company by scoring the most victory points from dinosaurs, tourists, rails, and more
⚙️Modular Board – The game starts by setting up 1 jungle map tile per player in random orientation, in relation to the starting map tile
⚙️Worker Placement / Action Selection – Each turn, players place one of their executive tokens between 2 tiles in the 4×4 action grid and take both actions they touch. They can lay rails, clear jungle tokens, take tourists on safari, capture dinosaurs, draw resort cards, and/or build resort cards
⚙️Route Building – A big element of the game is building out your railroad, as players need to be touching different spots on the map with their line in order to pick up jungles, dinos, and/or tourists from those spots
⚙️Resource Management – As they take actions, players will need to store resources on their train engine tiles. They can skip any action to unload, and they get to unload for free once at the end of each round. Players can not take actions that would give them more components if they do not have room on their train engine tiles

Who Is It For?

👥1 to 4 Players – The solo game was good, but for me, I wouldn’t want to set it all up for only solo games. The multiplayer game is good at any count, and definitely gets tighter with more players, which can be interesting
👥Ages 13 & Up – I’d call this one a little tougher than a “welcoming” game, since there are so many actions and strategies
👥Fans of train games, dino themes, and lots of variety

PROS

🟢Aesthetics – Looks great on the table!
🟢Components – The dinosaurs and train pieces are the best! But everything is very good quality, no complaints
🟢Rules are well written and clear
🟢Variability – Modular set-up, & a bunch of actions to choose from
🟢Player Interaction is interesting, and informs strategic decisions
🟢Turns/rounds play very smoothly
🟢There are a lot of opportunities for scoring, and you can continuously improve your scoring levels for various elements

CONS

🔴Set-up is a lot, especially with more players since you add more boards
🔴The board is also definitely a bit busy, and it can be a little fiddly to place trains in between the dinosaurs
🔴Some cards seem much better than others, and the deck is large, so you might not see multiple of a card just by chance, depending on how often that action is taken.

Final Thoughts

The game looks great on the table and plays really smoothly. I love that there are not only a bunch of options turn to turn, but a lot of paths to victory as well.

The board definitely seems like a lot at first glance, but I think once you learn the rules, and really start playing, it becomes much easier to parse through all the info on the board and get into the swing of it.

I think the cards felt like the swingiest part of the game, because some felt stronger than others. Ultimately, I think that you just can’t ignore cards because they have so many benefits, including scoring opportunities. But you can focus on getting all the different scoring features, or focusing really heavily on one, and still do well.

I really recommend this one to dino and train lovers alike!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 7/10

Designer – Ann Journey
Artist – Graham Burkum
Publisher – Spielcraft Games
MSRP – $79.00
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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