Designed by: Eugene Bryant
Lost Kingdoms: Pangea in Pieces sees the players as competing dinosaur species, struggling with both the tectonic slippage of the fledgling Earth, and the dastardly interference of the other players.
Each player has a set of coloured dinosaurs, and the game is set up by laying out a series of starter tiles so everyone has two dinos to begin with. Your goal is to be the most dominant dino species on the continents – any connected land masses – when the three asteroids hit, and on your turn, there are a number of things you can do, in any order.
You must, at some stage, add a tile to the growing landscape on the table, placing it so it lines up against at least one other tile. Optional actions are shifting a tile, migrating dinosaurs, and growth. Shifting allows you to push a tile orthogonally, as long as it always lines up against at least one other tile during and ending its journey. You can only shift a tile with at least one of your own dinosaurs on it, and you can only shift once. Migrating lets you move your dinosaurs: you get four migration points and can spend them however you like over the course of your turn, as long as you follow the basic rules: tile to tile costs one point, and land to sea (or vice versa) likewise one point. Growth allows you to add another dinosaur on a tile where you have at least two dinosaurs, and they must be on land. You can only grow once per turn. Having taken as many actions as you can (or wanted) you then draw a tile ready for your next turn.
Simple rules, then, but a fair bit to think about, as you try and push opponent dinos out of your business and keep yourself in a strong position. But wait, because there are some more dinos coming your way! On some of the tiles are pictures of dinosaurs: dilophosaurus, velociraptors, spinosaurus, T-rex and pteranodon. When these tiles are placed, the dino in question is activated, causing shenanigans: the dilophosaurus and spinosaurus kick player dinosaurs off the board, the pteranodon moves a pair to the tile with the pteranodon on it, the T-Rex effectively rules any continent it’s present on and the nasty little velociraptors prevent the growth action for anyone on the continent it occupies.
Mixed into the tiles are three asteroids: whenever one of these is drawn the game pauses (or ends, if it’s the third) and scoring takes place: having the most dinosaurs on a continent is good, but the bigger continents also score for second and even third place. There are bonus points to be had for the dinos on the biggest continent, and after scoring the third asteroid the game is over, and the player with the most points wins.
Plenty. The entire game is essentially a fight for control, albeit of the often passive variety.
Potentially high, depending on the number of players. See Sam Says/Joe Says.
High.
It's certainly unpredictable, but it depends how you feel about the lack of control.
2-5
Players
12+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
To give Lost Kingdoms its due, I have enjoyed it with my kids, where we played with a kind of breezy approach. But with a more competitive group (and an extra player) the game showed its flaws: although the rules are relatively simple, there's an enormous flexibility in how you apply them on each turn, meaning the game can slow to a plodding, staccato pace as everyone considers where to add their tile, which tile to shift (if any) how to spend their migration (if at all) and when best to grow, as the fact you can do these actions in any order at all kind of explodes each turn into an endless horizon of possibilities. And this shrewd thinkiness isn't necessarily rewarded by how the game introduces the incidental dinosaurs and the asteroids, both of which are thrown up entirely randomly. Every turn, we were basically navigating ourselves into the best position we could and then hoping to draw the asteroid. If you don't, then you watch your work get undone by everyone else doing the same thing, with the lucky one triggering the scoring at the right time. There's some nice ideas here, and the breaking apart of the landscape is neat, but overall it feels a strange mix of a perfect-information abstract game sabotaged by it's own unpredictable additions.