Lands of the Mesozoic Passes 400% Kickstarter Funding Mark

Pungo Games, a division of Worthington Publishing, is in the midst of a successful Kickstarter run for the prehistoric era board game Lands of the Mesozoic. In this tableau building game, players are tasked with creating balanced prehistoric ecosystems including lands, herbivores, and carnivores. Lands of the Mesozoic is for one to four players, ages 12+, and plays in around 60 to 90 minutes. The Kickstarter project is already beyond the 400% funding mark and you can reserve a copy of the game for a $55.00 pledge through October 7th. Expected delivery is next March.

You can check out my first look here and my overall thoughts on the game here.

About the game:

The Mesozoic era spans between 252 and 66 million years ago and is subdivided into the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. This is the time that saw dinosaurs first appear, dominate the world, and go extinct (except for some groups of avian dinosaurs, i.e., birds). However, dinosaurs weren’t the only animals of the Mesozoic; they shared their habitats with amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and others.

In Lands of the Mesozoic, 1 to 4 players will create and manage their own Mesozoic ecosystems using 3 main types of cards that symbolize the different levels of the food chain. The game comes with over 120 individual cards, all drawn by award winning Ukranian paleo-artist Sergey Krasovskiy.

Players will first lay down Land cards that represent the habitats that provide shelter and plant/insect/fish food. Land cards in play are used to pay for the cost of Herbivore cards. These are the animals using the resources generated in those specific types of lands.

In turn, Herbivore cards in play can generate the resources necessary for playing Carnivore cards. These are the animals at the top of the food chain, and they control the population size of herbivore species in the ecosystem.

All 3 types of cards need to be in balance for the ecosystem to be sustainable in the long term. However, competition between species and the shifting nature of the surface of the Earth, will trigger extinction events of animals and habitats that will open niches for new species to appear and spread.

At the end of the game, players will score points for played cards, collected Victory Point Tokens, and achieved common and personal goals. The winner is the player with the most points after 3 periods of 7, 6, and 5 rounds respectively.

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...

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