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So after years of working and tweaking and fiddling with my game I was dismayed to learn of a new card game coming out called Dinosaur King.
I totally freaked out.
What if it was exactly like mine! Or worse what if it’s way better than mine! In fact, what if it’s the greatest most successful card game ever invented by mankind!!! Who would even bother to glance at mine???
Then later I saw the game. My reaction became: “What a relief!”
First off, it’s nothing like mine. (Phew!) Second, it’s more like Pokémon with kids “summoning” dinosaurs (aka monsters) to fight each other. And third, one “special” card had what appeared to be a Styracosaurus ridding on a SURFBOARD!!!! At least that’s what it looks like to me. It’s ridding a wave coming toward the beach on some kind of red thingy. What in the name of all that is good, decent, and paleontological, is a 3 ton Styracosaurus doing ridding a surfboard??? It’s preposterous!
However it does help illustrate what I was and was not going for when I started to design the game. A recent post by Brian Switek on http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/ says it very nicely: “That’s the trouble with dinosaurs. Not only were they living animals that are objects of scientific study, but they are also malleable cultural icons that can terrify as much as enlighten.” So despite having “educational” facts on the cards, Dinosaur King’s story portrays dinosaurs as fantasy monsters used by the evil Dr. Z in a plot to take over the world. I understand season 2 of the cartoon also involves Space Pirates. So I guess in that context a Styracosaurus on a surfboard makes complete sense!
Right off the bat I knew I want to educate as well as entertain, but I didn’t want to distort what dinosaurs were either. In other words this would be a game about dinosaurs in their environment. Dinosaurs and just dinosaurs!
No time travel.
No DNA cloning.
No alternate reality.
No prehistoric “cave men.”
No talking dinosaurs or ANYTHING cute.
No modern technology of any kind, …or Cadillacs.
No cute kids ridding cute dinosaurs on surfboards while fighting space pirates.
And to be honest, that is what made it so hard to design; trying to balance the fun of a game with the educational opportunity. It’s especially difficult when you consider that a card game is pretty abstract to begin with.
Consider the example of deep time.
Most people think that all the dinosaurs ran around living together at the same time. But that is not the case, and different species were sometimes separated by millions of years. Even if they existed at the same time, not all dinosaurs lived in the same places. Just like Kangaroos and Polar Bears don’t hang out together today, T-Rex probably never ran into Velociraptor. Plus scientists divide up the Mesozoic Era when dinosaurs lived into three different periods called the Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic. You could further drill down to specific “formations” where certain assemblages of dinosaurs co-existed. While that would all be educational, the limitations imposed would make for a terrible game. So in Empire of the Dinosaurs, none of that matters and the dinosaurs co-mingle without any restrictions. However I made the conscious decision to limit all the dinosaurs in the game to the Cretaceous period. (If and when this ever gets off the ground, I imagine an expansion would then cover the Jurassic.) So to some degree I’ve tried to convey the idea that dinosaurs lived at different points in time, without it impacting game play.
However I went too far in trying to avoid treating all dinosaurs like monsters. For example, in one early version of the game my opponent played nothing but Predators. He totally ignored all the plant eating dinosaurs and just stuck with predators and won. I was shocked because I realized there really was no reason to play herbivores, even though the game revolved around them. They sort of just sat around and munched on plants, but they weren’t tied to the goal. Why?
The answer has to do with being in “conflict” versus being in a “race”. That and World War 2. Till next time,
…SURFS UP DUDE!
Oh… And this is a Styracosaurus:
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