Dinosaur Island discovers its Lost World in two-player sequel Duelosaur Island

Jurassic Park-a-like Dinosaur Island is digging up a sequel later this year. Hopefully it’ll be better than The Lost World, though.

The punariffic Duelosaur Island is a standalone two-player-only variant of the park management game, designed by Ian Moss with the aid of Dino Island co-creator Jon Gilmour.

Duelosaur Island is based on the core dice-drafting and worker-placement gameplay of Dino Island, but adds in a brand new hand-management tableau-building engine and an 'I cut, you choose' twist to selecting dice, which provided players with the DNA needed to cook up dinosaur recipes in the original game.

Players still roll dice and juggle creating exciting dinosaurs to pull in punters with maintaining the security of their park. What’s new is that the first player must assign bonuses to dice, with the second player able to select a die first – opening up space for risk-reward strategies.

There’s also a new card-based system, with each card containing DNA recipes to create dinosaurs and blueprints to build attractions for a bigger hand limit, more income and victory points, or they can be discarded to perform specific actions, such as combining DNA into new strands to mix up bigger and better (but more dangerous) big lizards.

Duelosaur Island includes five new full-colour DNA dice in the box, with the option to swap the dice with some of Dinosaur Island’s cubes for new gameplay options in both games, including an instant security upgrade symbol.

The game’s been in the works for over a year and sees the return of artists Kwanchai Moriya and Peter Wocken, meaning more eye-melting neon colours and flashy ‘90s design. The play time is said to be around 30 to 45 minutes, making it a nicely condensed version of its bigger sibling.

It’s due out later this year, with a US price of $35 – making a direct conversion around £25, but we’d expect a price tag closer to £30 over here.

Rising high on the back of Dinosaur Island’s success, publisher Pandasaurus has also briefly teased what seems to be an expansion for the original game, saying “Things are about to get bigger, a lot scarier, and there is a 100% chance of getting wet if you sit in the first 10 rows.” The studio has said it'll reveal more on March 12th.