Sauria Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Sauria, a semi-cooperative board game published by Millian Games. Sauria is a dino park survival game clearly inspired by films such as Jurassic PArk.

Over the last few years, I’ve had a bit of an obsession with dinosaur-themed games. I got Dinosaur World back in 2020, Holotype this year, and also backed PaleoVet. I viewed it as a bit of a pseudo trilogy, going from discovering dino types, to resurrecting them and building a park, to finally caring for them after said park collapses.

It was recently that I realized that there was a step missing in that loose chronology: the park breaking down and eating the tourists… er, the dinosaurs escaping. Enter Sauria, filling that niche, and supplying a cooler dinosaur theme! It is a game for 1-5 players, and is a lengthier game, coming in between 60 minutes and two hours. The best experience is with 3 or more players.

Think Jurassic Park without using the words Jurassic Park, and you should get some idea of what you can expect from this game. Each player takes one of eight character roles, some of which will seem very on-the-nose if you keep that thematic idea in mind: the paleontologist, the hunter, the scientist, the photographer, the saboteur, the ranger, the counselor, and the mathematician (sorry, chaotician, chaotician…). Played over the course of 16 rounds, the game is semi-cooperative, in that you need to make the necessary repairs to the island’s infrastructure in order to escape, which can be a team effort, but ultimately you are also trying to complete objectives to score VP. The winner is whoever manages to escape with the most VP.

The game lasts for 16 rounds, and each round is composed of 4-5 phases, starting off with an event phase that affects all