Uh Oh, Dino! Review— Jump around

I don't play a ton of cooperative games, mostly because their genres and mechanics are normally out of my wheelhouse–when's the last time you saw a heavy economic co-op? Combine that with my evolutionary failure to procreate, and I assumed someone else would be better suited to pick up our review of Uh Oh, Dino!. But the months trawled on and it languished in our backlog, so I figured I may as well give it a go. You'd almost think I'm a sucker for anyone doing something fresh in the hobby, cause I wound up having a great time with it. Okay, it might've also been the big chunky wooden components. A little bit.

The game tasks players with recovering a stegosaurus herd's eggs that have been scattered after an earthquake. You'll use your turn’s allotment of action points stomping map tiles back into place, running around, jumping over other dinos, and/or flinging them over you, all in the hope that your group can coordinate a leapfrog line bucket brigade to get to the eggs on the bottom and return to the nest as efficiently as possible. As always in co-ops, making judgement calls on necessary sacrifices is importan, but determining just how many actions you get for your turn through chit pull is the real crux of the game. The chips are wildly differently shapes, with smoother tokens giving fewer actions but more manageable or even beneficial effects and spiky ones allowing a flurry of activity with a near guarantee of an earthquake, or at least lava. Of course, none of this is 100%, with the bonus action fruit showing up in the spike pool, and bad effects likewise in the smoother tiles. 

As much as roughly pooling the tile effects and actions by shape feels like Uh Oh's masterstroke, I'm still a huge fan of how the events are implemented. Earthquakes work both as the game's timer and as the major obstruction keeping egg retrieval from going smoothly. Early game, it's a tradeoff between just getting out there to win the game by grabbing eggs and setting up your stegosaurus leapfrog trail, or just stomping the affected tiles back into place. It'll always feel like you can wait to manage the map degradation until somebody starts their turn on a tile that's getting too out of place, right up until you roll poorly to determine which tiles are affected, hitting the weak link and starting a chain reaction that'll demand the group's full attention. Or at least of those that have access, cause you've probably got some chasm action going on now. The lava works as a movement restriction, both in turn and after. Sure, you can't walk into it once it's hit the map, but it's more of a question of if it's worth the sacrifice you're making by dropping the lava wherever in order to end your turn where you did. I'm not going to have too many critiques of Uh Oh, but a major one I have is the lack of negative ramifications for letting your dinos die: when coupling the earthquake track being the game's major timer and the nigh-impossibility of keeping everyone in an effective location, there's plenty of times it seems actually beneficial to kill a dino that isn't holding an egg by dropping lava on them. But back to a brighter note, even the fruit bonus actions are handled well, as each player has a max number of tokens they can use, keeping any one from monopolizing the supply even if doing so would be beneficial to the herd.

As with any co-op with sufficient randomization, I will say that the difficulty settings are more suggestions than hard rules, since the true level of challenge will be more determined by your pull and roll luck, but I'm not complaining. Uh Oh, Dino! is the most fun I've had with a rules-light co-op since The Gang.