Fossilis

With a party of four, me included, we finally played Fossilis. Let’s kick this off with player count. With the time it takes people to view their options, it added too much time to the game, especially with the occasional case of analysis paralysis. Three players is likely a sweet spot. Sliding the sand, clay and stone tiles is ultimately how you expose the cavities to dig. It can be frustrating to some players as they can get pushed off the edge and have to spend an action on their turn to get back on the board. If your little ones don’t like a “take that” aspect to a game, as minor as this is, you may want to house rule this. Tiles comprise the gameboard surface have symbols on them. When you push one off the side, it’s yours. You can use those tile symbols to pay for tool and supply cards that offer one-use benefits. Plaster is key in the game and quite limited. Bones have a plaster cost to extract/obtain them so it’s a balancing act on your turn to carefully split your four actions to make sure you are acquiring plaster now and then. There are a TON of ways to score in this game. Leftover bones in your lab at game end, applying bones to dinosaurs, and set collection. Each dinosaur card has three symbols on it like carnivore/herbivore, land/sea/air and Jurassic/Triassic/Cretaceous. At game end you get bonus points if you had at least three of a specific symbol. So you may have had two herbivores and a carnivore, but if they all came from the Triassic era, that’s one type of additional points right there. It’s not my favorite game, but it’s a clever design and certainly works well for what it is. I did realize you’re better off just scoring one or two bones per dinosaur rather than completing their full skeleton as minimal scoring opens the floodgates for your set collection. That is where a boatload of points will serve you well at the end. Estimated play time is 45 minutes, but I’d say that’s if everyone is a seasoned veteran of the game.

KTBG is a great publisher and they really hit it out of the park with Fossilis. The gimmick is that you actually dig up dino bones! its phenomenal and ingenious. My kids loved it and because of the randomness of the set up, it has great replayability. I highly recommend.

The game is very easy to play

It's interesting to pick fossils. If you try to do it, the interaction will be quite strong, so you may like or dislike it. It's fun to collect a set collection of unique dinosaur cards.

The theme and production quality of this game are both great. The tactile experience of pulling bones out of the dig site with tweezers and sliding tiles to expose new bones has been really engaging for my kids too. I would say that the element of not knowing what resources you have access to until you expose a hole can be frustrating for a kid that “JUST NEEDS A HIP!” to finish his dinosaur, but I think we’re still figuring out the strategy of when to finish a dinosaur completely vs. partially. That aside, I would definitely recommend it.

It’s a really cool family game. Gives me nostalgia because you pull fossils out with tweezers, just like the game operation, except you don’t have worry about hitting the sides. Although putting the fossils and terrain tiles on top, makes the set up of this game the most fun set up. And unlike operation, this game has a lot going on with it, but not complex. This game also provides a good table presence too. And because it has a lot going on with it, most adults will also love this game, although kids will also like looking at it as well as playing it.

It has a few different layers of strategy that can easily be removed or added depending on the group you are playing with. Even though it is for kids older than my own, both my 6 and 3 year old enjoyed elements of it and have asked for it by name to play. I am trying to get them started early in the hobby, so this was a fun way for all of us.

Great family weight game, but also good for gamers

The gameplay is really good, the components are awesome, and my son loves digging for the dinosaur bones. I love that the game can be scaled for the skill level of the players by adding and removing components (explained in the rulebook). Setup and tear down is a bit long. The two biggest problems I have are 1) tools can be used on tiles that are not adjacent to the characters (this just seems odd) and 2) there skull fossil doesn't apply to any dinosaur. While it's worth 12 points for extracting it this doesn't seem like it's worth the cost in actions and plaster. The game says 2-5 players, but I think 2 is a stretch. The plaster pool isn't deep enough and the plaster costs are too high for two players to achieve many of the set collection bonuses. End of game scoring is a bit exhaustive as there are 9 steps to determine final score and 3 of those steps have multiple substeps. None of these negatives are enough to stop us from playing the game. It's a solid, fun game which we enjoy. It just seems like some places were overly fluffy and others are overly crunchy.