“But you didn’t ask for reality, you asked for more teeth.” - Henry Wu, Jurassic World. I enjoyed dinosaurs and the epic blockbuster Jurassic Park when I was young, with the awesomeness of the massive creatures to the terror of which they were capable. Fortunately, we do not need to deal with the terror of dinosaurs in reality, but Jurassic Park’s story plays the “what if?” game. What if dinosaurs were alive? What if dinosaurs interacted with humans? What could go wrong with those interactions? As my children have gained interest in dinosaurs and particularly LEGO Jurassic World toys and video games, I knew when I saw The Legacy of Isla Nublar that this would be a game that they would be interested in playing, and I was interested in taking this journey with them.
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Short Explanation of How to Play
This is a legacy game. If you are not familiar with the legacy style of games, you go through different goals and tasks each game, and the decisions and consequences that impact one game can impact future games. There are a fixed amount of games that you play before you reach completion. This particular legacy game goes through scenarios related to the first 5 Jurassic Park/World movies. I won’t say much about the actual gameplay because the point
of a legacy game is to have the experience of playing through each step of the way and the changes that occur along the way, but I do what to emphasize a couple of things about this game up front: (1) the artwork and presentation is beautiful, and it does an excellent job walking you through the rules and the steps for each playthrough. The necessary mechanics and rules are explained an easy to understand and easy to reference way, and (2) the nature of legacy games includes destroyed components, permanent changes to other components that you keep, and many experiences that only happen once.
Why it Works/Doesn't Work For Our Family
What Worked: The changing nature of each event in the game made it so we were excited to see how each round would play, and what potential rewards we could unlock. Again, I won’t say much about the particulars since there would be spoilers involved, but the fact that the flow of the game can result in rewards and punishments in the next game raised the stakes. The Jurassic Park theme hit home as my kids wanted to be their favorite characters in each game and they cared about the things that we were doing in the game. Finally, the fact that this is a COOPERATIVE GAME where we were racing against the clock in each game to complete the missions given to us made it a fun, interactive team building activity. We won together and we lost together. We worked together and made decisions together, which was great as a support for the kids but also allowed everyone to have input and ownership in the decision-making process.
What Was Challenging: The first challenge was the double edged sword of the legacy game. All the excitement and joy that comes with a new mission each time we played the game also came with the knowledge that we were ticking down those unique experiences each time we pulled out the game. At some point, we would hit the last mission, and the newness and uniqueness would end. Yes, the last scenario is replayable, so the game does not need to completely stop after completing the last mission, but when we got about halfway through the scenarios, the kids wanted to take longer breaks from the game, and avoid playing it, not because they didn’t want to play it, but instead because they wanted the game to last longer. Setup takes awhile, which is another challenge if we wanted to play a quick round.
Why it Works/Doesn't Work With Friends
I would love to try this with gaming friends, but again, the fact that this is a legacy means that my copy has gone to a playthrough with my kids, so I don’t have a great chance to try it with others. Notable thoughts and mechanics that would impact playthrough with a gaming group: teamwork and strategy is great in this game. Making decisions about what to do before each scenario and figuring out how to accomplish those goals mid-game can be a challenge and requires high levels of efficiency. There are some minigame activities that are built into the scenario that can be repetitive and make gameplay tedious at times. They came with good rewards, but the fact that we had to repeat them took away from the uniqueness of each scenario.
Teacher's Corner
This game is great for teamwork, planning, and considering the economic consequences of your decisions. Beyond the cost benefit analysis of various decisions, I would not focus on teaching particular concepts through a playthrough of this game.
Overall opinion, rating, and recommendation
6 year old son - My son really enjoyed the dinosaurs, and choosing to be different characters that he liked in this game. He said that the thing he didn’t like was the fact that we could only play it a limited number of times before the adventure was over.
9 year old daughter - My daughter liked this game, full stop. She loved the theme and the different things we unlocked along the way. She liked the different decisions that we made together, the strategy, and the planning.
Mine - I will rate this game Heavy Family. It works really well with kids of different ages as long as one person has a strong handle on the rules, mechanics, and goals of each mission. Even though my 6 year old didn’t always understand every detail of what we were doing, he could participate as part of the team. This is what I appreciated about the game. It was a theme we all enjoyed, and while the gameplay wasn’t always the most exciting that I have experienced in other games, all of the tasks we did throughout the playthrough we did together, working through the problems together which elevated the play for the family in my mind. If people don’t care about Jurassic Park, or only like competitive games, or don’t like planning games, this may not be a great fit. For our family, it was a perfect fit since we enjoyed the elements present in the game.
Games with similarities with this one at each rating level:
Casual Family: Jurassic World Dominion Stomp N Smash
Heavy Family: Charterstone
Casual Adult: Forbidden Desert
Heavy Adult: Pandemic Legacy, Season 1
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