A copy of Cretaceous Rails was provided by Spielcraft Games for the purposes of review

As someone who has never actually sat down to watch a Jurassic Park movie, I don’t necessarily understand how the dinosaur theme and the theme park aesthetic have become so intrinsically linked. From Dinosaur Island, to DinoGenics, to Draftosaurus, and now Cretaceous Rails, it feels odd that we have so many games about building the best theme park featuring dinosaurs. I assume Jurassic Park is to blame for this, but I’ve always found it dubious that if we invented time travel or resurrected dinosaurs, our first inclination would be theme parks.

Cretaceous Rails, designed by Ann Journey and published by Spielcraft Games in 2025 after a successful crowdfunding campaign, tasks players with building the best dinosaur theme park, although the theme park element is mostly absent from the gameplay.

Before I get into the aforementioned gameplay, the production of this game is a little gregarious, as is somewhat expected from a game that came from crowdfunding. The box is quite large, giving plenty of space for the brightly coloured dinosaur miniatures. The custom insert looks very well-made, but I’ll be really honest, I couldn’t quite figure out how everything was supposed to go back into the box after playing it. Thankfully, those wells for dinosaur miniatures are voluminous enough to hold nearly all the components for the whole game, leaving the top tray mostly barren.

I’m not always against big boxes, but I feel like in this case, the product size could have been shrunk a little to be a bit easier to fit on my shelves. I know the Kickstarter came with an expansion, Cretaceous Skies, perhaps the insert and box were designed to fit the expansion in as well, but for my experience, the box is larger than I feel is necessary. That being said, I cannot deny that the table presence is impressive. Seeing Cretaceous Rails set up on the table looks great, and makes you want to sit down and start playing.

What hooked me into Cretaceous Rails at first was the worker placement/action selection mechanism. A 4 x 4 grid of action tiles is shuffled every round, and then players take turns placing their worker onto the space between two action tiles, then taking the two actions their worker is adjacent to, in any order. The actions themselves are quite simple, lay some trains to expand your network, cut down some trees to provide better dinosaur viewing angles, take tourists on tours to increase the value of the dinosaurs, and capturing those dinosaurs to exhibit in your theme park. This system intrigued me, especially given that the grid gets shuffled every round to create some variety in what combination of actions are even available each round.

At first, I thought that Cretaceous Rails was going to be a pretty straight-forward game. It only took about 10 minutes to teach my friends, and we were off to the races. But then we immediately crashed up against the grit of Cretaceous Rails, in that each of the systems want to pull you in different directions. First, there are cards that offer some pretty fantastic player powers, it takes one action to bring two cards into your hand, and another action to build cards in your park. To build cards, you have to pay their costs using the appropriate dinosaurs, tourists, and jungle tokens. To get jungle tokens, you need to build your train into the jungle, and take the chainsaw action, pulling the jungle token from a tile onto your train. You can capture dinosaurs in the same way, but you can only capture a dinosaur if the jungle token on that tile has already been removed. Tourists, on the other hand, go on tours. You load one onto your train, and they increase the point value for every dinosaur of the same colour adjacent to your entire train network, but only if the jungle token has been removed (after all, you can’t see dinosaurs through trees). This push and pull of tourists needing to see dinos to increase their value, and capturing the dinosaurs so you can score them, creates some tense decisions between players who can both access the same dinos.

Once you’ve pulled things onto your train, you can forfeit an action to empty the whole train onto your player board, which allows you to spend those resources to build the cards. The challenge shows up when you remove a jungle token with one action, and then another player captures that dinosaur before you have the opportunity to take someone on a tour. Or, do you take a sub-optimal tour now, so you can use the tourist to build a card, or do you spend an action or two making that tour even better? All the while hoping against hope that the other players don’t step on your toes. And even worse feeling, when there’s something you desperately want to do, either because it’ll earn you a tonne of points, or deny someone else, but then your train is full, so you need to spend an action unloading, creates some fascinating trade-offs.

The card powers are pretty great, and many of them will make you jealous when your opponents use them. Things like your tourists are no longer impeded by trees, or placing up to 3 extra rails when you take the rails action. The downside of the cards, is that most of the card powers will be improved depending on how high up in your structure you build them. Again, do you hold onto the best card until you can build it on the 3rd level and use it to it’s maximum potential, or do you build it early, and use it more often, but to less effect?

All of these systems play into each other in different ways. I never found any obvious optimal paths to take, the puzzle was always very open with seemingly multiple viable options available to me at all times. I will say I enjoyed the plays with more player counts, as at two players it was really easy for the two players to just go off in different directions and largely do their own things. Also, the action grid doesn’t change with the number of players, making the 2 player experience even more open, which I felt robbed the game from some of its tension.

Despite its oversized box and a theme that doesn’t really quite jive with its mechanics, Cretaceous Rails surprised me with how engaging and cleverly interconnected its systems are. The game strikes a compelling balance between accessibility and strategic depth, offering a satisfying puzzle of timing, positioning, and resource management. Its modular action grid, open-ended decision space, and tight competition over shared resources make each play feel fresh and dynamic, particularly at higher player counts where tensions naturally escalate.

Cretaceous Rails manages to shine amongst the dinosaur theme park games through smart design and solid gameplay. It’s an impressive debut for designer Ann Journey, and a title that fans of mid-weight strategy games will find themselves returning to more than once. Whether you show up to play with the great dinosaur miniatures, or are settling down to just wrestle with the puzzle, there is plenty of fun to be had in Cretaceous Rails.