Game alert: Evolution takes flight on Kickstarter

When I posted my essay Monday about the history of prehistoric-themed board games, I didn't expect this week would be filled with news about them. Now it turns out the popular card game Evolution is getting both a second edition and an expansion that will allow players to create animals capable of flight.

North Star Games - the publisher of Evolution - is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the expansion, titled Evolution Flight. The company also is planning a second edition with major changes to many of the cards - a strange move given the first edition hit stores just last year. The good news for anyone that owns the game is that if you pledge $25 for a copy of the expansion, the company will send you the updated 100 cards at no additional cost, provided it hits at least $50,000 in pledges. The game was already at $23,700 with 44 days to go in the Kickstarter campaign at the time of this post, so it is very likely the pledge amount will go above and beyond the amount needed to get the updated cards.

I admit I was distressed when I learned about the Kickstarter: I had just purchased a copy of the game a few hours earlier! I'm happy I will probably get the new cards along with the expansion, but I can't help but think of those retailers whose copies of the game may go unsold once word gets out a second edition is already in the works. It doesn't sound like a smart business move to release an updated version of the game so close to the release of the original version, but then again, I'm not in the board game business.

Anyway, click here to see the campaign. $25 will get you the expansion. $55 will get you the second edition. $75 will get you both.

New game: A deck full of dinosaurs

History buffs who play board games probably are familiar with the Timeline series of card games. Now amateur paleontologists will get to see what all the fuss is about with the most recent edition in the series, Cardline: Dinosaurs.

Cardline: Dinosaurs is already out in France and will debut in the U.S. sometime between July and September of this year, according to BoardGameGeek. Here's the description of the game from the publisher's website:

The diplodocus is clearly heavier than the tyrannosaurus, but what about the brachiosaurus? I imagine that the stegosaurus is lighter than those three, but does it weigh less than a wooly mammoth?

In Cardline Dinosaurs, these are the kind of questions you’ll be faced with each time you want to place one of your cards. There’s only one goal here -to be the first one to correctly play all of your cards.

This box contains 110 cards built around the theme of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. All of these cards are compatible with the cards from the Cardline Animal series. This way, by using various boxes with different themes, you increase the possibilities and the fun of playing.

That description isn't particularly helpful in describing gameplay but I've played other games in this series and can assure you they're pretty fun. Basically players try to get rid of all the cards in their possession by placing them in the right sequence in relation to other cards in play. In the history game, cards must be arranged from the earliest historical event to the most recent. In Cardline: Dinosaurs, cards must be arranged from the smallest animal to the largest or from the lightest creature to the heaviest. (Players decide at the start of the game which category they want to use.)

The video below gives you an idea of what the game looks like. Its biggest selling point is the tin that holds the cards. The card art is colorful, but unfortunately the dinosaurs lack the anatomical accuracy one would find had the company used a paleoartist instead. Still, I plan to pick up a copy of the game once it hits the states.

Dinosaurs & Dice: A short history of prehistoric gaming

Dungeons & Dragons may be best known for dragons, but dinosaurs have been part of the roleplaying game since its start.

When D&D co-creator Gary Gygax penned the first edition of the system’s Monster Manual in 1977, he included a small menagerie of dinosaurs alongside the book’s otherwise mythological bestiary. Located in the "D" section between “Devil” and “Displacer Beast” were dinosaurs such as Ankylosaurus, Iguanodon, and, of course, T. rex:

"Because of the nature of time in planes where magic works, dinosaurs widely separate in time are discussed hereunder, for they can be found intermingled on some alternate world, strange plane, or isolated continent somewhere."

Many roleplaying games, board games, and miniatures systems have featured dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. They are not nearly as numerous as games about elves and goblins, and most dinosaur-themed games are targeted at kids. But there is still a considerable number of games out there that can be enjoyed by adults who never outgrew their love for the ancient past.

Board games

The earliest dinosaur-themed board game listed by BoardGameGeek is the Alley Oop Jungle Game, published in 1936. Based on the comic strip of the same name, Alley Oop is a simple spin-and-move game obviously made for younger kids.

The following decades would see the release of several prehistoric-themed board games, most tie-ins to popular TV shows, like The Flintstones or Land of the Lost. Most were simple “roll-and-move” games, with players rolling dice and moving their pawns the same number of spaces as the result.

Things didn’t get interesting until the 1980s, a time when board game designers started to experiment with game mechanics. One product of this era was the 1985 board game Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs, in which players moved their explorer pawns across a 3-D board while avoiding T. rexes, pteranodons, and an erupting volcano. That same year saw the release of Tyrannosaurus Wrecks, a "microgame" in which time-traveling hunters journey to the Mesozoic to bag dangerous dinosaurs. Two years later came what I consider the best dinosaur-themed board game yet made, Dinosaurs of the Lost World. In the game, players lead expeditions into a prehistoric wilderness, seeking out new discoveries while avoiding hostile beasts. (If you want to know more about Dinosaurs of the Lost World, see my review.) The end of the decade saw the release of Tyranno Ex (1990), a “eurogame” in which players evolve their dinosaurs to survive in different habitats.

Despite this initial burst of innovation, most prehistoric board games have remained simple affairs. That said, there have been a few exceptions, such as the “caveman” game Stone Age (2008). Other prehistoric-themed games that can be enjoyed by grown-ups include Primordial Soup (1997), Evo (2001), Urland (2001), Wildlife (2002), Conquest of Pangaea (2006), and Evolution (2010; second edition 2014). The rise of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter have allowed for the distribution of games publishers would have otherwise ignored, such as Apex (2015) and In a World of Dinosaurs (To be released).

Roleplaying games

As mentioned in the introduction, dinosaurs have been a part of roleplaying games since the start of the hobby. They would play a central role in the Dungeons & Dragons adventure module The Isle of Dread (1981), which was inspired by the film King Kong. Another King Kong-themed adventure module, The Isle of the Ape, came out four years later. When the D&D campaign setting Forgotten Realms was first unveiled in 1987, an entire landmass was set aside for the terrible reptiles: the peninsula of Chult. This setting was explored in detail in the 1993 supplement The Jungles of Chult. If that wasn’t enough, dinosaurs would get their own (inner) world to inhabit in D&D: Hollow World (1990).

Of course, D&D is not the only roleplaying game in existence. Lands of Mystery (1985) was a Hero System supplement that served as a toolbox for players who wanted to create their own “lost world” adventures. Another notable non-D&D setting is Space: 1889. This game, first published in 1988, takes place in an alternate 19th century where all the planets of inner solar system are habitable. Venus is a jungle planet inhabited by dinosaurs and lizardmen, while life on Mercury is just starting the transition from sea to land. The setting’s creator, Frank Chadwick, also wrote Cadillacs & Dinosaurs: The Roleplaying Game (1990). Set in the world of the comics, the game contains an extensive bestiary of prehistoric wildlife.

The popular roleplaying game system GURPS would get on the action with GURPS Dinosaurs (1996), which not only boasts stats for more than 100 extinct animals, but also has an introduction by paleontologist Jack Horner. One of the stranger settings to incorporate dinosaurs came in the form of Dinosaur Planet: Broncosaurus Rex (2001) by Goodman Games. The game is best described as a space Western with dinosaurs filling the part of Native Americans. Dinosaurs would return to Earth with the release of Hollow Earth Expedition (2006) by Exile Game Studio, which was heavily inspired by the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

As for more recent works, Cubicle 7 Entertainment released Primeval in 2012, which is based on the British television series about prehistoric creatures unleashed on the modern world.

Miniatures gaming

The history of prehistoric animals in miniatures gaming is harder to pin down than that of board games and roleplaying games. Many miniatures rulesets were published by tiny companies on shoestring budgets – I have rulesets that were probably produced on a desktop printer. Also, to play miniatures games, you need miniatures of dinosaurs and other animals, which are rare.

The earliest ruleset I have in my collection is Tusk (1994) by Matthew Hartley. This game lets players hunt mammoths and dinosaurs using easy-to-learn rules. Hunting dinosaurs also is the central focus of Saurian Safari (2002) by Chris Peers.

Other rulesets focus more on adventuring rather than hunting. One is Thrilling Expeditions: Valley of the Thunder Lizards (2008) by Rattrap Productions, which allows players to game "lost world"-type adventures. The same company also released the gaming supplement Dragon Bones: Adventures in the Gobi Desert (2005), which turns Roy Chapman Andrews' fossil hunting expeditions in 1920s China into Indiana Jones-like escapades. For gamers who prefer living dinosaurs to fossils, there is Adventures in the Lost Lands (2010) by Two Hour Wargames. Then there is Perilous Island (2013), a supplement for the miniatures system Pulp Alley.

Conclusion

Are there any games that I have missed? Plenty, much of it intentional. If you believe there are games worth mentioning that didn’t get a shout out here, feel free to point them out in the comments.

Isaac Asimov's Robots in Time: Predator by William F. Wu (1993)

Cover blurb

FROM THE MOST BELOVED NAME IN SCIENCE FICTION – A SPECTACULAR NEW ROBOT SERIES!

Governors are the ultimate in robot evolution. Composed of six separate robots, each can single-handedly run an entire human city. Now they have begun to fail mysteriously. The last unit, MC Governor, realizes its own destruction is approaching. The Third Law of Robotics comes into effect: a robot must protect its own existence.

To save itself, MC Governor breaks itself down into six component robots and launches its parts into the remote past. But there's something MC Governor doesn't know – time travel causes a change in its molecular structure. If its pieces are not returned to their own time, they will explode in a nuclear inferno, destroying the fragile web of human history.

Only an experimental robot named Hunter and a hastily assembled team of human experts have a chance to find the MC Governor robots before they change the past – and the future. Their first target is in hiding somewhere in the age of the dinosaurs. A robot determined to survive. A robot willing to be branded – PREDATOR.

Toward the end of his career, the late science fiction genius Issac Asimov explored the concept of robotics and time travel in his only robot time travel story. That tale, included here, inspired this new series – an adventure across time authorized by Asimov himself.

My thoughts

Perhaps the greatest claim to fame for an author is having your name appear on books you didn't write. Issac Asimov had been dead for a year when the first of the six-book series Robots in Time came out in 1993. He had nothing to do with the series other than it was inspired by a short story he wrote about time-traveling robots. Still, his rock star status in the science fiction world has the power to sell books, which is why his name is displayed more prominently than that of the actual author, William F. Wu, who was hired by the publisher to write the series.

Unfortunately, Robots in Time doesn't get off to a good start in Predator. The story centers around the disappearance of MC Governor, a Voltron-like robot that splits into six different robots that flee into the past out of fear they will be decommissioned by the humans who control them. A new robot called Hunter is built to seek out the six robots and return them to their proper time period. (Actually, Hunter resembles a human, so the correct term would be “android” if you wanted to be semantic about it.) Hunter deduces the first robot fled into the Cretaceous Period, so he assembles a team of three humans – a roboticist, a paleontologist, and an outdoor survival expert - to help him track down the rogue 'bot. What the team doesn't know is MC Governor's creator has also traveled into the past to round up the six robots so he can salvage his reputation, no matter the cost.

Predator is a book with many flaws, but its greatest sin is it is simply boring. The stakes are not high and there is never any sense of danger despite the mingling of humans with dinosaurs. Here's the thing: Good adventure stories need mystery and suspense. Mystery comes from withholding crucial information until a time when its revelation has the greatest dramatic impact. Suspense comes from creating tension, both through character conflict and through putting characters in seemingly unwinnable situations. Predator blunders on mystery by spending the first 50 of its 220 pages explaining the villain motivations instead of letting readers watch as the main characters unravel the clues. It blunders on suspense with human characters who are more bland than the robots that accompany them, so readers couldn't care less about the petty fights they have. As for action, no character ever faces real danger. Hunter has super strength, so he easily fights off any dinosaurs that appear. Even the rogue robot doesn't post any threat thanks to Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which prevents robots from harming people.

The writing is bland and workmanlike, with most of the text just long stretches of bad dialogue. Wu puts no effort into describing either future Earth or Cretaceous North America. Several dinosaurs make appearances but they are mostly window dressing, disappearing after a couple pages never to be seen again. One exception is a Struthiomimus the protagonists catch and train to use as a mount in less than a day. That should give some idea of the quality of science in this science fiction novel.

There are five other novels in the Robots of Time series, but only Predator has dinosaurs.

Trivia

• Predator was released the same year as the first Jurassic Park movie. That explains the focus on dinosaurs. It also explains the many references to chaos theory throughout the novel, although the science behind it is never explored in any detail.

• Wu says on his website the novel was written for younger readers, so he toned down the story's language and violence. Still, the book was marketed as adult science fiction. That's not as big a stretch as you would think: I once had a bookstore owner explain to me that she placed the science fiction section next to the young adult section because there was overlap in readership.

• A summary of all six books in the series can be found on Wu's website.

Reviews

• The Science Fiction Review