Rubén Hernández’s Dodos Riding Dinos was one of those games people talked about. The kind of nutty activity that combines a longstanding tabletop genre with silly dexterity elements. I mentally associated it with killer titles like SEAL Team Flix, PitchCar, and Space Cadets. These games marry the frivolous kinetic energy of flicking with a more serious foundation of tactical miniature combat, racing, and…whatever you would call Space Cadets. This genre mashup is wonderful because it has the ability to cut through the fog hampering traditional games and get right to the joy of the hobby. Typically, we only see this achieved in children’s games, and many others could stand to benefit from such creative experimentation. So, bring ’em on. More of these wonders, please.
But the thing with experimentation is, sometimes it doesn’t work.
I have to imagine Dodos Riding Dinos hit harder in 2021. At this time, the Mario Kart board game category was slim. Rush & Bash was forgettable. Crazy Karts was a big whiff. Wacky Races was all aesthetics. But now? Well, now is a different story. Dungeon Kart is a hoot and a surprisingly effective simulation of Mario Kart. Thunder Road: Vendetta, while not exactly a kart racer, is a stellar exercise in carnage. And then 2025 brought us a magnificent re-release of one of the best silly racing games in all of modernity. I can’t ever imagine reaching for a dodo when I can instead dance with a magical athlete.
Maybe it’s unfair, but this category just received a huge jolt in recent years and those who couldn’t keep up have been left behind.
Before these dinos go extinct, let’s talk about some things this game does well. It is undeniably kooky in a fun way. Players are attacking each other by flicking, tossing, and dropping objects like meteors and bananas. You get to roll a big log from just above your racer, trying to slew foot your rivals. The engine is also swift. Simultaneous card play means the game moves along at a rapid pace, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. You can setup and complete a five-player race in a half hour or so. This is accomplished with some devilish player interaction and a few tense moments. This type of silliness greatly appeals to children and it’s a very bright and effusive family game with excellent pieces and multiple boards to fiddle with.
The card play is also ungoverned. The most powerful cards are risky to play. They are flagged with a red color status and only trigger their significant effect if a single one is played. So, there’s a bit of risk in playing these maneuvers as they’re unreliable and wild. Effects are all over the place. You can do things like swap places with the leader or sometimes move a stupid 15 spaces and just cruise the bulk of the track. There are real absurd effects, and I would never accuse this design of being bland or too safe. The short length combined with this unrestrained play works to produce an experience that is unpredictable and chaotic in a humorous way.
Things start to go wrong when it strays from simplicity. It’s as if it’s veering off the track and unable to corner effectively. This is mostly evident in the dexterity elements. I’m talking about trying to adjudicate how high to keep your hand when dropping a meteor or how to properly toss the feather by only moving your wrist but not your arm. These points of rough contact are spread throughout the design. People who hate the imprecision of measuring in miniatures games will nope right out of Dodos Riding Dinos.
The damage system is kind of interesting. It’s a Gears of War cards as damage mechanism. For every point of damage you receive, you must discard a card from your hand. But it’s random. Yes, allowing players to choose would be worse, but the frequency of damage received in this game means that players are constantly shuffling their hand and having another player pick cards for them to lose. It’s almost exhausting at times. You can see it in the victim’s faces as they let out a sigh and fan their cards out. Often, a player will run through their entire hand and then have to redraw. If one were to describe Dodos Riding Dinos as a game in constant motion, this would be true, but it would be describing the constitution of player’s hands of cards and not the on-track antics.
One minutia that sticks out to me is how you have to move your figure out of its space temporarily so that you have room when flicking an egg. This serves as the perfect metaphor for the game’s two halves and their jagged contact. Things repeatedly get in the way, and the result is a general vibe of dissatisfaction. This exists in the card play as well, such as how awkward it is to perform interrupts when other players are taking their turn. This game is a seemingly rapid ordeal and benefits from this pacing, but unless you slow down and pause for timing windows, you will find this experience is full of rewinding as players object and want to sneak in a reaction. It can be very rough at times and the clunkiness can’t be suppressed.
This rough characterization is particularly galling when compared to the aforementioned Magical Athlete. Games aimed at targeting a wide audience, especially non-hobbyists, need to prioritize a smooth process. While it is true that Magical Athlete can run into conflicts and messy situations regarding ability collisions, adjudicating such instances are the most delightful moments of play. Part of that game is stumbling into those thumps and seeing what wild outcome materializes. That’s not the case when someone isn’t observing the spirit of the rule in how to properly toss or drop a piece, or whether we’re trying to figure out if it’s fair game to back up and allow a player to perform a reaction. The imprecision is ubiquitous.
Dodos Riding Dinos stirs up some interesting internal conflict. I firmly believe in judging art relative to its time. Citizen Kane is wholly unimpressive without context. But is comparing this design to Magical Athlete or Thunder Road: Vendetta unsportsmanlike? When a game is superseded only a couple of years later, is it not indicative of an abundance of quality titles and the need to offer something tremendous to separate from the pack? Its animated carnage was immediately outdone by Restoration Games auto-dueler, and its silly causality is bested by CMYK’s stupendous re-release. In playing this dexterity game, I was left desiring the emotional beats of its competitors and regretting the time spent in a lesser activity.
I would describe Dodos Riding Dinos as lively and attractive. It’s an overtly inviting game that strongly appeals to children, both of age and heart. And it does understand the concept of the kart racer pretty well, homing in on the violence and energy of the genre. But it’s absolutely run over by its peers. Flying off ramps and exploding on canyon walls is adrenaline fueled mayhem. Attaching your Suckerfish to Baba Yaga and then tripping over a giant banana is outlandish. Dropping a meteor token and then trying to decipher the messy board state to determine which pieces were actually hit is, well, totally fine.
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Player Elimination 