Welcome to “Board with Myself,” a feature in which I talk about solo board games and board games with solo modes. Sometimes you don’t have a lot of friends. Sometimes you don’t have many friends at all. That’s when you have to be board with yourself.
Been a long time since I wrote about solo board games! We’re back in business, baby!
Today, I’m talking about Tiny Epic Dinosaurs, which is basically an off-brand Jurassic Park board game. That itself is its own sub-genre, because people love theme parks and they love dinosaurs and they love abstracting those out into a tedious three hours of debating rules. There are so many dinosaur park games.
The big selling point for Tiny Epic games is - and this will shock you - that they come in small boxes. On the other hand, they’re not always epic. They’re pretty good games! And coming in small boxes is one of the greatest things you can do for people who live in one-bedroom New York City apartments. But the games themselves can sometimes feel like they’re slightly simplified versions of bigger board games. Namely because they are. That’s the reason.
However, the Tiny Epic games always come with a solo mode. And boy, howdy, how I love a solo mode! I’m bringing all the single-player board games to the nursing home when I die.
Anyway.
Tiny Epic Dinosaurs runs across six rounds. Each round, you place workers to get resources or dinosaurs. These resources can range from food to fences to special cards that give you special dinosaurs. The dinosaurs themselves range from being a dino to being a saur. After you receive your resources and dinosaurs, you have to put your Jurassic Park Triassic Zoo animals in enclosures. Then you feed them. Then you breed them. If you don’t have enough food or fences or space for new dinosaurs, they escape and you’re penalized based on the type that ditched you.
The winner is decided via victory points scored from dinosaurs, engineering cards, and completing tasks that require certain combinations of animals.
It’s all a little confusing at first. The fact that each round contains four or five mini-turns is also weird. Tiny Epic Dinosaurs is one of those board games where halfway through, you’ll realize you’ve been forgetting the most important step and nothing you’ve done so far counts. It’s not complicated, but it is a little confusing.
But what about solo mode?
Surprisingly easy to follow and incredibly hard to beat!
When playing alone, Tiny Epic Dinosaurs uses a small deck of cards to decide the “rival” park’s actions. The way this works is pretty simple: I just described it. Seriously, the rival cards basically play on the board and based on one of two options, your fake opponent gets resources and points. I had more trouble following what I was doing than the ghost player.
As far as how this plays out for your rival, sometimes this means adding dinosaurs to its own park, sometimes it means randomly getting a ton of victory points for no reason. In fact, a lot of the time it means randomly getting a ton of victory points for no reason. The solo game is real fucking hard, folks.
The rival deck is overpowered as the day is long and seems to give the other player far more resources and dinosaurs than you can possibly manage on one turn. Beating it solo (heh) takes a wild amount of luck. Fortunately, there are different solo opponents you can play against with different advantages. Unfortunately, they’re all assholes.
In fact, I kind of think this game could work better solo just as a score attack game. The same six rounds, the same gameplay flow, but just lemme do it alone to go for a high score. I guess I could actually do that because nobody’s stopping me. That’s why I play solo. Because nobody stops me anymore.
Nobody.
Always nice to find a fellow solo board gamer!