Raptor Board Game First Impressions

“You keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like T-Rex – he’ll lose you if you don’t move. But no, not Velociraptor. You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that’s when the attack comes. Not from the front, but from the side.”

~ Dr Alan Grant – Jurrasic Park

Mamma Raptor has escaped from her run and laid her eggs in the park. A team of scientists must neutralize her and capture the baby raptors before they run wild into the forest.

Raptor is one of those games where each player plays a card from their hand face down, reveals it simultaneously and takes the actions accordingly.

One side plays as the Raptors trying to escape while the other player is the Scientists trying to capture them.

The board tiles, tree figures, Mama Raptors, Baby Raptors and Scientists are added to the board. Each player has their own unique deck of cards, this is shuffled, 3 are drawn and the game starts.

Card Play

Players play a card and reveal it simultaneously as I mentioned… The player that plays the lower number takes the action on the card. The player with the higher number gets action points equal to the number on their card minus the number of the card the opponent played. So if you play a 9 and they play a 6, you get 3.

I played the Scientists and actions involved moving in Jeeps (moving a scientist in a long straight line), knocking out Baby Raptors, starting Fires and adding more Scientists to the board.

The Raptor player can call baby Raptors over to the Mother, Frighten Scientists and move the Mother off the board to bring back on in the next action, anywhere. They can also force the Scientist to play their card first before choosing theirs.

Actions

For actions, a Scientist can capture an adjacent KO’d baby Raptor, and capture 3 to win. The Mother can eat an adjacent Scientist and if they clear the board of Scientists they win.

You can wake up your Baby Raptors or recover your frightened scientists and of course, move around the board 1 space per action. Move 3 Baby Raptors off the board to win.

The Scientist can shoot the Mother with a tranquilliser to put a Sleep token on her, 5 and they win. One of the Raptor cards removes these tokens.

The scientists can also put a baby Raptor to sleep and capture them. Capture 3 of these and you win.

You have a nice sheet with all this information on plus a reminder of what the other player can do.

When someone hits one of these win conditions, that’s it, that player wins.

Raptor Summary

Now I play a lot of these games where you flip over a card and take an action and most aren’t a good fit for me. Mission: Red Planet stands out and that is designed by the same team as Raptor so… that tells you something…

This is a game that can be played by anyone who plays 2 player games. This is due to its ease of play. It would easily work alongside other games that play quickly like Patchwork or play to fill a gap after a longer game like Star Wars: Rebellion.

A very good game, another Cathala and Faidutti win.

Jesta ThaRogue