The picture above illustrates the main problem I found when trying to gather up dinosaurs for gaming. While there is a huge variation in the actual quality of the toys you’ll find and how well they adapt to the gaming table, the main problem you’ll find is one of scale. The four dinosaur toys above are all meant to represent the same species – Deinonychus.
Picking a standard scale to work in is problematic, you could pick your favourite dinosaur and find a good toy and then only pick up other toys that match that single figure for scale… I mean if you want to route around discount shops forever… alternatively you could stick to a bigger toy manufacturer, Papo and Schleich make dinosaurs which I believe are to scale with each other, however at that point you lose the discount aspect of the Dino-hobby.
In the end I gave up ever really presenting anything too historical after all the fun is in having dinosaurs from completely different time periods facing off against each other. Or as many toys are based on older interpretations of dinosaurs which now have almost no similarities with the actual extinct creature, why worry that much? So why not take a similar approach to scale?
This creates a problem with the rules. You can’t ‘stat’ a dinosaur since toys of that dinosaur come in all shapes and sizes. To set one stat line for Deinonychus would not work for all the toys you can see in the picture above. So early on in the rules process I decided you would have to create your own stat lines and I would simply provide a system for you to work out how many points your custom dinosaurs cost.
I’d like to work out a few more kinks before I unleash my own rules on the world. But if you do want to jump into some dinosaur gaming now go visit a pound shop and find a rule set that focuses on melee combat, and lets you create your own statlines, Open Combat and Song Of Blades And Heroes are two great examples!
Deathzap 