Tabletop Tuesday — Escape from Dino Island

Happy Tuesday! As is usually the case round these parts, I’m talking about gaming today, and over the last two weeks I got to be a player in the TTRPG Escape from Dino Island, a tightly-constructed, intended to be a one-shot by design game of… well, at the most basic, simplified version? It’s the film/book Jurassic Park. But that’s maybe over-simplifying, since while the premise is that of the movie—”What if island full of dinosaurs and something goes wrong and everyone needs to escape?”—which dinosaurs, what goes wrong, and who everyone is can be different every time, and honestly?

It was a blast.

Pick a Character, Tell a Story

When I say Escape from Dino Island is designed as a one-shot, I mean it. The DinoMaster (DM, heh) gets a sheet with a pretty clear path and progression to wind the characters through, whereas the players choose characters from pre-generated sheets: The Doctor, The Engineer, The Hunter, The Kid, The Palaeontologist, The Soldier, or The Survivor—there’s also The Smuggler as a bonus character, released later. The characters each have a “special move” or two, as well as a choice of one of two abilities they can unlock later when they “advance.” You also get to assign three stats: Clever (how smart your character is), Fit (how physically fit your character is), and Steady (how good your character is at anything while under stress): for everyone but the Kid, you assign a +2, a +1, and a -1. The Kid gets two +1s and a -1. Whenever you do a move that requires a roll, you’ll be rolling 2d6 and adjusting that roll with Clever, Fit, or Steady.

Then you add a name, pronouns, and pick a few descriptors to give yourself a baseline idea of what sort of person your character is—as well as getting one “rumour” from the DinoMaster each, which might come into play later.

In our playthrough, I went with a Canadian engineer, Zachary Douglas, or “Zed” to most, who was hired to set up solar power systems throughout the island on the various rooftops. He was still somewhat young, but highly competent (Clever +2), in good shape—but only from time in the gym, never outdoorsy stuff (Fit +1), and kind of used to things going as planned (Steady -1).

Once everyone has picked their character, things get passed to the DinoMaster for you all to craft the opening scenes, which involves how you arrived, what you know about the island, and how the hell you intend to get out of this place.

So, What Brings You Here?

As a group, with the DM, you’ll answer questions, broken into categories. The Mainland—why you’re coming to the island, who you are, and what you might know about the island before you arrive (this is where the DM gives you a rumour)—gives you the backstory of your group; The Arrival—literally you arrive, see your first dinosaur, and then of course something goes very wrong; and then dropping the characters into Right Now—Where you are, what ways off this island are you aware of, what’s the problem with getting to that exit, and a mystery that needs solving in the meanwhile. For each of these major questions, there are six options if you just want to roll it out, but you can choose them instead.

The rumour Zed heard was the CEO of Dino Island was a bit “off.” Like, not so much a genius as lucky and right-place-right-time with the actual brains of the process, but believed himself to be better than he actually was. My group arrived, saw some dinos, and then while we were riding the monorail (the only way around, really) the power cut out. We were stuck, above the trees, on a busted monorail with no idea what was going on—and the extra mystery? Compasses suddenly couldn’t decide which way was north, and our phones and radios seemed to be picking up random noises.

Just Add Moves (and Stories) and Go!

The game mechanics are super-simplified. You’ve got Peril Moves (rolls you make while things are dangerous: Run!, HIde!, Just Do It!, Hold Onto Your Butt!, Look Over There!, Take My Hand!, and Fight!) and Safety Moves (rolls you make while things aren’t immediately dangerous: Lay of the Land, Instruct, Scavenge), and of course, your character-specific options. When things aren’t dicey, you can just do anything your character is supposed to be competent at. Otherwise, it’s a 2d6 roll, adjusted by the relevant stat of Clever, Fit, or Steady, and the results of 6 or less are bad, 7 to 9 are a mixed success with a downside, and 10 or more is a flat-out success.

A fun mechanic for those of us who like improv and roleplaying off-the-cuff is the inclusion of “Telling a Story” as part of some of the rolls. For the Safety Moves, when you’re doing a thing—like getting the lay of the land—you answer one of the questions on the bottom left of your character sheet, telling a story to the other players that further sketches out your character.

Throughout the game, we learned why Zed is annoyed at over-designed technology, his love of vinyl, and how he wished his company had allowed him to keep working on his solar-powered jacket design (because it would have come in handy a couple of times). There are specific questions there for those who might need a prompt, and crossing out those stories as you tell them is one of the ways you find out how much of a denouement happy-ever-after your character might get (you add the number of stories to a 2d6 roll, with the usual 6-or-less bad; 7 to 9 is okay, but; 10+ is good.

The DM has moves of their own, and a remarkably streamlined “from here, to here, to here” system to work with for a very short game booklet—I won’t give the details away on this front, but the short version is even a fairly novice DM should find running a one-shot of Escape from Dino Island none-too-stressful, as there’s a very clear roadmap you can choose to follow, and the mechanics are pretty straightforward. The moves the DM can use are clear, and the “Acts” of the story are laid out in a clear order, and in every case, there are examples the DM can mix-and-match to work with.

In our case, it quickly became clear that whatever had gone wrong on the island was creating weird temporal anomalies. Things we found seemed to get older and older, the labs had CRTs and older computers in them than they had when we’d first arrived, and the power systems went from being solar to hydro to gas…

Though we did find an eight-track BeeGees cartridge, and so we had a sing-along to “How Deep is Your Love” while we booked it away from the lab that seemed to be filling up with anachronisms, as well as dinosaurs who seemed to maybe be wearing shreds of human clothing like the humans were devolving/transforming into dinosaurs, which really motivated us to get the hell out of here.

Every Time I Hear That Song, I’ll Think of Irwin…

Lovers of math-rocks may have noticed the dice are not particularly forgiving on your worst attribute of Clever, Fit, or Steady. On a 2d6, needing at least a 7 to partially succeed, you’re looking at a base 58% chance of succeeding in some measure, but you don’t roll flat, you roll with a +2, +1 or -1: so 83% success when it’s your +2 stat, 72% with your +1 stat, and… 42% if it’s your -1 stat. But dice will dice, right?

And boy did they in our game. We were the kings of rolling 4s and 3s. Soon we were all injured, and doing our panicky best to come up with a solution for the pack of dinosaurs chasing us in our jury-rigged four-wheeler and ultimately, thanks to the Palaeontologist’s awareness that these dinosaurs were after the noise, my slightly-concussed engineer dug out his high-tech, heavy-duty tablet, set it up to blare “Baby Shark” and tossed it off into the trees, which—partial success roll—got most of the dinos off us, but then one jumped onto the car and was snapping at my face (not a fan of “Baby Shark” I guess) and our Hunter, Irwin, tried the most dangerous move of all—fighting—and, well. The good news is Zed didn’t get eaten by a dinosaur. The bad news was Irwin only managed to take the dinosaur off the back of our car with him, landing by the tablet, and he got eaten to the tune of “Baby Shark.”

Doo doo do doo do doo.

Who Are You?

The cool thing about this is you just grab a new character sheet and join the group as another character, so Irwin the Hunter was replaced by Alex the Soldier sent in to figure out what the hell was happening on this island (his team was not very nice, and quickly abandoned us because we’d slow them down, but he stuck by us), and with his help we made it to a hangar with a plane, found more survivors there but not enough seats, made the executive decision that the CEO did not deserve a seat (listen, I’d been listening to my audiobook of Careless People, but also the CEO was a jackass), and while the soldier heroically stayed behind with the unlucky folk who didn’t draw a good straw, the rest of us flew off the island to go get help.

I think the death of Irwin was a moment we realized how the game was set-up. Once you make peace with the idea that you might be here for a good time—not a long time—Escape from Dino Island has a lot more joy to be had in it. Adjusting our expectations from “we’ll survive this!” to “maybe I can get a really cool death scene that helps the others make it off the island!” added a fun wrinkle. Especially for characters like The Soldier, The Hunter, and The Survivor.

Denouement

I mentioned earlier the thing about telling stories during safety moves, and how it adjusts a final sort of “when you do get off the island, then what?” mechanic. In our case, the dice weren’t particuarly kind, giving two of us partial successes, and the Soldier we left behind… well. Even when you do your best, sometimes you roll snake eyes.

His denouement scene, his player decided, was just a dinosaur passing by the camera, wearing Alex’s watch. No other survivors, especially not the CEO.

For Zed and Dr. Longfellow (our Palaeontologist), we got partial successes, so we decided as we finally escaped the weird anti-radio, anti-compass effect in our little pontoon plane, and Zed finally got the radio working, the first thing he picked up was the final moments of the 1972 Russia-Canada hockey game.

Temporal anomalies. What you gonna do? We couldn’t send help back because the island wasn’t even inhabited yet. Sometime later, maybe. But Dr. Longfellow realized he could go make all his important discoveries all over again—this time with tenure and actual funding!—and Zed realized he was very, very ahead of the curve in the world of tech, and even had some of it on him, like his phone. Their futures—now decades in the past—were going to be bright.

(We couldn’t stop ourselves there, however, we decided on some end-credit scenes: Dr. Longfellow sought out his future mentor, who was currently still a student, and taught her the thing she’d taught him that saved his life earlier; then we had a brief glimpse of Zed listening to some dudes pitch a company to him, saying they needed start-up capital and that they were sure it would be a big thing, and him asking them to tell him what they were thinking of calling their company, again, and when they said “Apple” he said, “I’m in.”)

Do you have a favourite one-shot system? I’ve only ever really played one-shots for systems designed to also function with campaigns, so this was my first real brush with a game intended to last one (or two) sessions in total.