Happy Little Dinosaurs

With a subtitle like "Smile, the End is Near," it's pretty easy to guess the tone of Happy Little Dinosaurs.  But I guess if they called it Sad-Ass Mopey Dinosaurs Who Are Totally Doomed, it would be a hard sell.

It's a cute idea, and the cards all have sad dinosaurs.  They are very well drawn with a solid and likeable art style.  And most of the cards have pretty funny blurbs explaining the actions and disasters they show.

Gameplay was simple.  Each turn you turn over a disaster card, then each player plays an action card face down.  Flip those cards together.  The player with the highest card gets the points shown on the card, but the player with the lower points gets to add the disaster card to their character folio -- they also get the points on their action card and one point for each disaster card they own.  Because, as the game says, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

The goal is to be the first to move your dino-meeple up to space #50 on your folio.  The game was a bit spoiled for us by having too many little modifiers on the cards and it's not always clear what order to play them in.  Each hand has a few distinct phases: playing action cards, scoring, post-scoring (getting disaster cards and those extra points).  But the Pet Rock card in particular made no sense.  It was worth 0 points, so if you play it you will lose the hand and get a disaster card, while all it says is you can score a different card from your hand.  So you can lose with a zero and get points from another card.  It does not say you play that other card in the action card round.

We will have to try this a few more times, and maybe watch some videos of other people enjoying it, before we can really say if it all made sense.