Board Game & Book Pairings: Fearsome friendly dinosaurs!

15 Oct Board Game & Book Pairings: Fearsome friendly dinosaurs!

Who doesn’t love dinosaurs? With hundreds of species spanning millions of years, ancient reptiles were incredibly varied in appearance and lifestyle. This month, we’re exploring a game and book pairing that provides an inside look into the current science and the fictional daily lives of our extinct neighbors.

Board Game: Happy Little Dinosaurs

• Like the philosopher says, “Life moves pretty fast.” While we’re trying to get on with our lives, disasters of varying sizes interrupt our plans and require us to adapt. This isn’t new, though—dinosaurs also had trouble getting through the day!
  • Players: 2-4
  • Playing time: 30-60min
  • Age: 8+

  From Boardgamegeek: “Lately, it feels like we’re all just dinosaurs trying to avoid the falling meteors. In this game, you’ll try to dodge all of life’s little disasters. You might fall into a pit of hot lava or get ghosted by your dino date, but the dino who survives it all wins the game!
  “In Happy Little Dinosaurs, the first person to reach 50 points or be the last Dinosaur standing wins the game! During each round, you’ll flip a Disaster card featuring a Natural, Predatory, or Emotional disaster. Each player will play a Point card in hopes of collecting points and avoiding the disaster.
  “You will work to avoid all of life’s little disasters and laugh as they happen to your friends. If you collect 3 Disaster cards of the same type OR 3 different types of Disaster cards, you will be out of the game. Point cards feature weapons, trinkets, and good luck charms that you use to collect points and avoid disasters. Each card has a point value between 0 and 9 that you will use when scoring a round. You can use Instant cards at different points during the game to tip the odds in your favor or save your Dinosaur from certain death.
  “Player boards include your Dinosaur’s traits, an Escape Route you use to track your score, and a Disaster Area where you will collect Disaster cards. You’ll move your Dinosaur meeple along the Escape Route on your player board to track your score. Will you successfully dodge the disasters or get eaten by a prehistoric whale? Only the cards can decide.” (description via https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/325414/happy-little-dinosaurs)

Book: Dinosaurs: The Grand Tour – Everything Worth Knowing About Dinosaurs from Aardonyx to Zuniceratops by Keiron Pim

• Dinosaurs have sparked the imagination for generations, inspiring both researchers and artists. Dinosaurs: The Grand Tour is guaranteed to delight readers with gorgeous illustrations and facts about these ancient reptiles and the paleontologists responsible for their discovery!
  • From the publisher: “We live in a golden age of paleontological discovery—on average, we find one new dinosaur species per week. The most fascinating among them take their place in this updated edition of Dinosaurs: The Grand Tour; from Aardonyx, a lumbering beast that formed a link between two- and four-legged dinosaurs, to Zuniceratops, which boasted a deadly pair of horns. Here, you’ll find everything worth knowing about every dinosaur worth knowing—more than 300 in all, including:
    • The amphibious Halszkaraptor looks like no other dinosaur we’ve found—with a head and body the size of a duck’s, sharp claws, and a swanlike neck.
    • Longer than a blue whale and three times taller than a giraffe, Patagotitan is a newly discovered contender for “biggest dinosaur ever.”
    • The speedy little feathered predator Stenonychosaurus is an anatomical marvel, with retractable claws, asymmetrical ears for excellent hearing, incredible night vision, and a huge brain.
    • Oviraptor—whose name means “egg thief” —doesn’t deserve its bad rap. This specimen from 1923 is now proven to have been sitting by its own eggs, not stealing another’s.
    • Sinornithosaurus shed their skin the same way that humans do, rather than sloughing it off all at once like a snake.

  “At-a-glance sidebars put each dinosaur’s diet, size, and location at your fingertips. Stories of harrowing expeditions conjure the thrills of history’s most famous dinosaur hunters. Highlights from recent research reveal what’s new in paleontology today, including scientists’ evolving idea of what dinosaurs actually looked like. (Hint: They were more colorful—and feathery!—than we ever thought before.) And illustrations on virtually every page bring these prehistoric creatures to life in all their glory.”
  (Description via https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/fall-2019/dinosaurs-the-grand-tour-second-edition/)

Bonus:

While most ancient species went extinct, some dinosaurs evolved to fit their changing planet. In Dino Birds, PBS Nova examines how feathered dinosaurs survived and continue to thrive as modern-day birds.